unicode Siouan

[R. Rankin]

> There are several problems with using the Standard
> Siouan et al. character
> sets.  One is that these sets are only used - at the
> moment - by
> Siouanists and you would be better off in the long
> run using a Unicode
> scheme.

Yes, ordinarily I've just used SSDoulos for entire
documents with a size 11 typeface, and that has worked
well and matched Times very closely.  This past
semester however I had two paper deadlines for
different publications.  One wanted strictly Courier
New and the other Times New Roman.  They were rather
inflexible about it, and I'm afraid this is going to be
happening more and more.  Happily, I discovered that
the newer versions of these two fonts that came with my
XP machine had all the vowels with macrons and breves
and other symbols necessary to reproduce Swanton's BAE
Ofo transcription and my phonemicization of it.  The
only exceptions were the /O-ogonek/, the /J-hacek/ and
the /glottal stop/.  Using the "equation" feature of
Word, I got the ogonek and hacek to overstrike the
proper segments and I ended up simply reverting to /?/
for the glottal.  Still, it's nice to have all the
additional charx that Gentium or SILDoulos provide.  I
can't really say that I prefer one or the other of
those.  The latest versions are both quite nice.  Now
if only publishers will be a little more understanding
. . . .

> The Windows extended character sets are also a pretty
> good match for
> Siouan now, and they may map to 16-bit Unicode (or
> some encoding of it)
> now, too.

That's what I found with Times, but, as you say . . .
> However, you will find problems with things like some
> vowel-ogonek-acute combinations, all
> vowel-ogonek-grave (etc.)
> combinations, some raised letters (as letters in
> their own right and not
> superscripted regular letters), some consonant-hacek
> combinations
> (j-hacek), and maybe some of the tailed-n letters
> (enye, eng?).  Oh yes,
> also glottal stop.

In Times (TNR) you can get the various accents to
overstrike other charx and compose what you need.  In
Courier, however, they will not overstrike, at least on
my machine, in Word.  Glottal stop, of course, always
gets printed as "zero", so you have to go with question
mark or apostrophe.

> We haven't achieved either one, I think, but I
> understand that we are
> getting close to the full Siouanist character set.

We're "there", I think, in the Unicode versions of
Gentium and SILDoulos, as well as the very
klunky-looking Titus Cyberbit Basic, but not quite so
in the fonts the publishers most commonly ask for.

> I think at least one Mac adaptation of my fonts
> succeeded for a student of
> Dick Carter, but I have never tried to keep track of
> the Mac adaptations
> or how they were achieved, so I can't help there.

The SIL website has separate font downloads for PC's
and Mac's, so maybe they're still a little different
(or maybe it's the download protocols that differ).

The solution to the O-ogonek problem that involves
using O-tilde instead would get into diacritic
stacking.  The unicode fonts will do this but it looks
poor.  Keeping nasalization beneath and accent on top
of vowels is the better solution.  But then I quite
generally disapprove of using IPA in phonological
transcription.  It is designed for purely phonetic
purposes, has a lot of bizarre-looking symbols, can't
really provide for phonological affricates and has a
host of other problems.  For the past few years it's
been pushed really hard by the unemployed phoneticians
who lost their own departments in many European
universities and came flocking en-masse into
Linguistics, but even though they look upon IPA as "the
metric system of transcription", using the older and
better-established Americanist symbol set just makes
more sense phonologically.  I like the mnemonic of
having common diacritics for particular features --
i.e., s,z,c,j with the hacek make more sense to
students than using the klunky S, 3, tS, d3, etc.  But
enough of the soapbox.

Bob