A few comments on this thread: Ken W. wrote: > >Furthermore, Michael carefully dodged the point that all of these > >Indo-European sources are *already* fonted, styled text. They > >are *not* plain text, but mix italic citations with Roman forms. > >Unless we are going to also head down the road of plain text > >italic letter clones for Indo-European, all of this material already > >has to be dealt with as rich text.
Michael E. replied: > The run of the citations are italicized to set them off from the rest > of the text. Same as with the UPA. This is not the same thing as > saying that what's within the citations isn't required for plain-text > representation. Though these subscripted letters are most commonly italicized, they do not occur solely so. (For an example of their non-italic use, see the phonetic realization of the laryngeals at: http://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/didact/idg/idgphon.htm#XEN9, under section 2, in the row for laryngeals. I am collecting other examples.) I have seen reconstructed forms (which are typically italicized) also set in plain text, and this may vary depending upon the style of a publication or an author's style. (An example of setting reconstructed Proto-Indo-European in plain text is: "Computational Cladistics and the Position of Tocharian" by Don Ringe, Tandy Warnow, Ann Taylor, Alexander Michailov, and Libby Levison, in _The Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Peoples of Eastern Central Asia_, Vol. 1, ed. by V. Mair, Washington, DC: Institute for the Study of Man, 1998, pp. 391-414). Philippe added in his thoughts: > But I still think it would be > a bad prececent for Unicode if it starts accepting some very specific >notational systems used in a fonted document written with a author's >own choice, where subscripts/superscripts/italics would be used only in >relation with author's specific notation (In case Philippe was referring to the subscripted letters...) The subscripted letters e/a/o are now adopted by many authors, and appear, for example, in the _Encyclopedia of Indo-European Culture_, ed. by J. P. Mallory and D.Q. Adams (London and Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn,1997). This tome also uses the h with a subscript x, which has also now been adopted by two new handbooks on Indo-European. (I will track them down for examples.) Debbie Anderson Deborah Anderson Researcher, Dept. of Linguistics UC Berkeley Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
