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I think it IS a Unicode problem.<br>
<br>
What happened was that the grapheme A (with its various
realizations) was split up into two different graphemes by IPA. But
in Unicode, there are only two different characters for "ordinary a"
and "script a".<br>
<br>
What we evidently need is three different Unicode characters:
ordinary a, IPA script a, and IPA open a. Font designers need to add
an italics form of IPA open a, and languages where script a is used
distinctively should not use ordinary a.<br>
<br>
See also Wikipedia, as so often very informative:
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alpha">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_alpha</a><br>
<br>
Martin<br>
<br>
Am 3/1/12 6:47 PM, schrieb Jan Menge:
<blockquote cite="mid:4F4FB622.50500@uni-koeln.de" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">Dear all, dear Peter,
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">But this is indeed not a SIL problem, it is a more general Unicode
</pre>
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<pre wrap="">problem.
Although I perfectly agree that this is not an SIL problem, I'd like to
point out that it's not a Unicode problem either. Unicode is supposed to
encode characters independently from a specific font or typeface, and
this is exactly what it does here.
/a/ being rendered as a slanted /ɑ/ in most fonts when italicized is an
(in our case rather unfortunate) outcome of our Western typesetting
tradition and font design history, but it shouldn't concern Unicode by
its very definition.
So considering that /ɑ/ will be confused with the traditional italic
rendering of /a/ when both are in "true" italics, it would rather be
worth discussing if (us linguists) picking this symbol as an IPA
character was such a wise choice in the first place.
We're coliding with our own font design tradition here, not with the
concept of Unicode.
Best wishes,
Jan
Am 01.03.2012 16:47, schrieb Peter Arkadiev:
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<pre wrap="">Dear all,
to add to this, Unicode fonts create problems with italicizing "æ" to "œ", which is annoying, too, especially for those who occasionally use examples from languages as exotic as Skandinavian.
But this is indeed not a SIL problem, it is a more general Unicode problem.
Best wishes,
Peter
01.03.2012, 15:03, "Don Killian" <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:donald.killian@HELSINKI.FI"><donald.killian@HELSINKI.FI></a>:
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<pre wrap="">Hi all,
This is perhaps a silly question, but I was wondering if anyone would be
willing to help with a problem I've been having.
As far as I'm aware, it's common practice to have single words in
italics when they're inside text and from another language. For
languages with insufficient or non-existent orthographies, this is then
done in IPA.
Charis SIL is the only font I personally know of with full support for
italicized IPA. Some other fonts can handle most of IPA, e.g. Deja Vu
Sans and Arial Unicode, but some of the combine characters can cause
problems.
However, Charis SIL has a rather annoying feature: when you italicize a
it becomes ɑ, and in many ATR languages of Africa, the distinction
between a and ɑ does indeed exist. To turn this off, you're forced to
use a user-selected variant of slant-italics, which not all programs
support, or make your own font, which can cause other problems such as
with some typesetters or journals, who aren't willing to do that.
When I emailed SIL, they weren't willing to change the basic function of
the font because they said there hasn't been a demand for it.
But right now, this means that linguists are left without a single
option for a font supporting both IPA and italics.
If anyone has any alternatives they've used, I'm open to listening, but
I can't imagine having both italics and IPA in an article or book is
very rare, and I've seen numerous books which have evidently had
problems with this.
And, if anyone else would like to email SIL, their email address is:
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:nrsi_intl@sil.org">nrsi_intl@sil.org</a>. Perhaps more linguists requesting this feature could
encourage SIL enough to create a font with support for italicized IPA.
Best,
Don
--
Don Killian
Researcher in African Linguistics
Department of Modern Languages
PL 24 (Unioninkatu 40)
FI-00014 University of Helsinki
+358 (0)44 5016437
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<pre wrap="">
--
Peter Arkadiev, PhD
Institute of Slavic Studies
Russian Academy of Sciences
Leninsky prospekt 32-A 119334 Moscow
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:peterarkadiev@yandex.ru">peterarkadiev@yandex.ru</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.inslav.ru/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=279">http://www.inslav.ru/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=279</a>
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