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<font face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">Dear colleagues,<br>
<br>
let me please question the presuppositions of Don's query:<br>
<br>
1) Italics are needed (alas, almost only in linguistics) to mark
an expression as being mentioned rather than used. What matters
here in the first place is not the status of the material as being
object of the discourse rather than part of it, but instead
marking off the <b>difference</b> between mention and use. That,
however, can be achieved in a variety of ways. Among them is
setting off the example in an indented paragraph of its own (and
numbering it). Another is to put it in a different type font. If,
for instance, you quote Greek examples in your English linguistic
text and quote them in the Greek alphabet, it is superfluous to
italicize them. The purpose of marking them as mentioned rather
than used is achieved sufficiently by the difference in the fonts.
And has anybody ever seen a quoted piece of text written in
Chinese characters and italicized? Now the same goes for quoting
linguistic material in IPA. Since the metalinguistic text is not
written in IPA, the purpose of marking the object-language
material off is achieved sufficiently by putting it in IPA. No
italics needed.<br>
<br>
2) Writing in italics is cursive writing. The slanting is one
aspect of cursive writing. However, on top of this, a couple of
letters used to have different shapes in cursive writing. <i>a</i>
is among them, but it also used to be true for <i>r</i> and <i>z</i>.
Apparently, <i>a</i> is the only one whose special shape in
cursive writing has survived in some of the italics fonts. (There
are, of course, fonts that imitate handwriting and that attend to
the other letters mentioned, too). Thus, the purpose cannot
possibly be to ban </font><font face="Times New Roman, Times,
serif"><i>a</i> from the italic font variants, declare it a
special letter and always have it appear as <font face="Courier
New, Courier, monospace"><i>a</i></font> in italics. That must
be left to the individual fonts. One might argue that a font that
provides IPA characters should italicize a as <font face="Courier
New, Courier, monospace"><i>a</i></font> and </font><font
face="Charis SIL">ɑ</font><font face="Times New Roman, Times,
serif"> as </font><i><font face="Charis SIL">ɑ</font></i><font
face="Times New Roman, Times, serif">.(hope my different fonts
come through here). However (see #1), is it really needed?<br>
<br>
Best wishes,<br>
Christian</font><br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Prof. Dr. Christian Lehmann
Seminar für Sprachwissenschaft
Universität Erfurt
Postf. 900221
D - 99105 Erfurt
Tel.: +49/361/737-4201 (selbst)
+49/361/737-4200 (Sekr.)
Fax: +49/361/737-4209
E-Post: <a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:Christian.Lehmann@Uni-Erfurt.De">Christian.Lehmann@Uni-Erfurt.De</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.christianlehmann.eu">http://www.christianlehmann.eu</a>
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