> [Original Message] > From: Philippe Verdy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > From: "Ernest Cline" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > (Besides, I think unifying the phonetic > > symbols with Latin was a mistake done solely to ease the transition > > from legacy encodings.) > > But the phonetics notation allowed by IPA is still useful to represent languages > that still don't have a defined orthography. When time elapses, and literacy > levels in that language progresses, such phonetic notations will tend to be > borrowed as a standard way to write that language, and then extended to > include other Latin script features such as letter cases. > > Some time in the future, I bet that most IPA symbols will evolve into plain > Latin cased letter pairs, if they are kept in the orthography.
I never said IPA wasn't useful, I just think it would have been better if it had been defined as separate script and when an IPA symbol turned into a cased Latin letter pair, to have added two letters instead of one. IPA has both a lack of case, and a stricter definition of glyph shape than Latin does which to my mind provide a difference between IPA and Latin. However, I don't think that disunification there is going to happen in general, altho I do think that a and g need to be disunified from the IPA symbols since IPA assumes that they have forms which they don't have in all fonts. LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH HOOK and LATIN SMALL LETTER G WITH LOWER LOOP What do you think? Would it be worth coming up with a formal proposal for these two to disunify the IPA symbols from LATIN SMALL LETTER A and LATIN SMALL LETTER G? That would allow for fonts that don't normally use the IPA forms for LATIN SMALL LETTER A and LATIN SMALL LETTER G to support IPA if they wished.
