IPA damage of the 20th century

[Eric Brunner-Williams in Portland Maine]

Dan,

Somewhere at UofA there is a copy of some version of Unicode. I've got an
almost current one on my desk -- version 3.0 (current is 3.1).

I wish IPA referred to India Pale Ale, find one (unless that is not wise),
and go over to the UofA's CS library and get the Unicode 3.0 tome out and
turn to code points 0x021A-0x0233, 94 squigglie thingies. Penobscots have
schwa. Turn to spacing modier letters (0x02B0-0x02C2) and you can find a
wee little "w", also in Penobscot. Phonetic modifiers derived from Latin
sounds nice, but in practice -- ugh. Latin Extended-B has the Abenaki "8".

So, start with the contact literatures, its what I see a lot of, in English
and French. The Euros-of-the-Period (EotP) wrote with transliteration "on".
By the time the shooting stops, high-science has replaced religion and
business requirements for Indian writing. EotP write with transliteration
"off".  Enter the typewritter and all the speed-writing systems as the modern
female secretary-cum-dictaphone is socially invented, and you get the 19th
century, a gazillion syllabaries with Germano-Scientific notation schemes.
Fast forward to the the ernest anthros of the WPA period recording the last
gasps of Tonto and you get a whole new layer of garbage, and the EotP write
with transliteration "off".

Of the three, the first was the better approach.

The PRC went through a writing reform, now there is simplified and traditional
characters. It wasn't painless. It did expand literacy in the PRC.

Since I've mentioned Unicode, I'll send one bottle of IPA to the first ILAT
subscriber who finds both errors on pages 456 and 457 of Unicode 3.0 A 2nd
bottle goes to the first ILAT subscriber who can dvine how these errors got
in Unicode.

Well, Dzidzi is crying, so Kitakita--kitcat,
Eric