At 07:11 -0700 2004-06-10, Peter Constable wrote:
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.
It's not like it's samizdat, though.
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).
It's reasonable to think that they would. Although Pullum and Ladusaw don't show the glyphs, they refer specifically to Doke's characters (s.v. ///). They describe them as "ad hoc" which I suppose the were, in 1925, though "novel" would do as well as they aren't entirely arbitrary and they weren't "found" bits of lead type pressed into other service -- they were cut to order.
That Pullum and Ladusaw have not forgotten Doke's characters suggests that Africanists will also likely not forget them, and will find use in access to them as encoded characters in the UCS.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
