> -----Original Message----- > From: Kenneth Whistler [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> But it is decidely wrong to take > what has all along been the unmarked/lowercase glottal stop, If they have been using it as unmarked case, how can one say that it is unmarked/lowercase rather than unmarked/uppercase? > reinterpret it as an *uppercase* glottal stop and introduce > a new lowercase glottal stop. *That* would result in endless > confusion and in data corruption. Actually, I think (and said a week ago or whenever) that leaving 0294 as lowercase and adding a new cap-height uppercase was more likely to lead to confusion and data corruption: the code charts show 0294 as cap height, and a new character would also show as cap height; data where an unmarked-case character is needed would have both 0294 and the new character mixed together; some fonts would contain cap-height glyphs for 0294 (while some would use x-height glyphs), and users would get confused and frustrated as a result. For those situations in which unmarked-case glottal has been used, I think it would cause the least confusion to leave 0294 as a cap-height glyph, and call it upper case. > Look at the text of Pullum and Ladusaw, p. 211. All those > x-height forms are simply glyph variants. But have people been using 0294 as an x-height character? Most likely not in cases where an upper/lower distinction is used (they would have been using some custom legacy encoding). Of unmarked-case situations, x-height glyphs are not commonly used in phonetic transcription, that I'm aware of, and are never required. So, if they used a x-height glyph before and end up with a cap height, the data is still equally valid and legible. The only potential problems would boil down to orthographies with unmarked-case glottal that have encoded data in Unicode and that have used 0294 but explicitly require an x-height glyph. Not too likely, methinks, and whatever problem exists would be contained to only that pre-existing data. The confusion from the alternative, having a cap and a lowercase that can be displayed like a cap, would remain forever. Peter Peter Constable Globalization Infrastructure and Font Technologies Microsoft Windows Division
