Issue 1, issues 2 & 3

[Jaakko Leino]

Klaas Ruppel wrote:
>
> Principal decisions to be made in regard to Greek letters:
> A. If there is a (IPA) Latin version of the Greek letter in question
> which one we choose?

Other things being equal (as if they ever were), I'd choose the latin
version--if for no other reason, just because the fonts are probably
drawn so that "latin" letters go more nicely together that "latin" and
"greek" letters mixed freely. Besides, I agree with Erkki that we should
use IPA characters whenever there's no reason not to do so.

> B. Which ones to choose: Greek letters Theta, Phi or Greek Symbols
> Theta, Phi (the latter ones have the "FUPA look")?

I humbly and sincerely beg you not to choose the letters, but the
symbols. Especially the greek _letter_ theta looks very odd to me. Or,
rather--and worse still--it looks quite familiar, but not quite with the
same meaning as the _symbol_ theta. The letter is fine for theta roles
and IPA, but not FUPA.

As for the ENG versus ETA question, I still feel (as I did about a year
and a half ago when there was a discussion on the issue on this list)
that the ideal solution would be to have them both in "free variation",
because that would reflect the actual situation in FUPA.

However, if a choice has to be made, I wouldn't choose ENG. In my (yes,
somewhat pedantic) opinion, ETA is the original shape of that FUPA
symbol, and it should stay that way. I feel that this is a reason not to
follow IPA (or Sami ortography, for that matter), although the question
is not the most critical one.

I apologise for arguing about things that are already settled, but in
this particular case I couldn't help myself. With this rate of grapheme
changes, we'll be writing plain IPA in less that a millennium ;-)

Best regards,

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