> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Michael Everson
> The sounds they represent are idiosyncratic and difficult to > describe, much less write. Personal? No: he published. Novel? Perhaps > (in 1925); Doke is likely to have devised them. Private use? Be > serious, John. That's a pretty ridiculous suggestion. If no other author uses them, then I think it's not unreasonable to suggest that they are private-use: Doke puts the terms of the agreement into his product, his readers enter into that agreement when they decide to read the book. It is "private-use" as opposed to conventional use if the readers agree to read his symbols but don't adopt them for their own use. Of course, it's an empirical question as to whether anyone else in that era did, in fact, adopt any of these symbols, or whether authors today ever use them (e.g. in citing Doke, whose work was of some importance in Africanist linguistics). Peter Constable
