IPA in spreadsheets (was: antedating "hobo" 1885)

[Mark Mandel]

On Thu, May 28, 2009 at 9:14 AM, Elizabeth J. Pyatt <ejp10 at psu.edu> wrote:
> A list of Unicode fonts with IPA characters in them are at
> http://tlt.its.psu.edu/suggestions/international/bylanguage/ipa.html
>
> The page also includes links to IPA utilities (keyboards/palettes)
> and links to code charts.
>
> FWIW - Windows Arial Unicode font has IPA and the Mac Lucida Grande
> also has them. The Mac Office 2008 (for OS X 10.5/Leopard) also has
> the Arial Unicode font, which is helpful when exchanging Office docs
> between platforms.

We found when working with less commonly taught languages that not all
fonts that support Unicode function equally well with some uncommon
combinations of diacritical marks with Latin characters. From my notes
on Yoruba:

------------------

Yoruba is written in the Roman alphabet with three main diacritical
marks: acute and grave accents (  ́  ̀) as tone marks over vowel
letters (a e i o u ) and the syllabic nasal (m  or n ), and a dot (
̣) or vertical line (  ̩) under e , o , and s . The dotted letters are
considered to be separate letters from their undotted counterparts.
The macron (  ̄) is also used as a tone mark over the syllabic nasal
only: n̄ .  Some sources use a circumflex or caron to indicate a long
vowel with high-low or low-high tones (â, ǎ). The diacritical marks,
especially the tone marks, are often omitted.

All the vowels with acute and grave accent, and all the letters with
an underdot, have single code points in Unicode. The dot and the tone
marks can also appear together, but these combinations do not have
single code points, nor do the letters with a vertical line with or
without tone mark.

Underlining may cover the underdot, and in some fonts, including Arial
Unicode, the combining acute and grave accents do not float properly
above the capital underdotted E̩  and O̩ : Ẹ +  ́ = Ẹ́; Ọ +  ̀ = Ọ̀.



--
Mark Mandel
Linguistic Data Consortium
University of Pennsylvania

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