On the affricate question

[Johanna Laakso]

Xel'sinkisë kavto tyozhat omboce ien' davolgovon' kevejksëece chistë /
Helsingissä helmikuun yhdeksäntenätoista kaksituhattakaksi

[Pekka Sammallahti:] " - - there is a discrepancy in the system which
can't be corrected with a double letter (how should one mark a palatalized
double letter etc.)." - The principles of marking the palatalization in
such cases have been debated. The last comment I recall was an e-mail by
Esa-Jussi Salminen on writing Udmurt in latin script. I believe that
technically this problem could be solved rather easily by encoding a
couple of extra characters, BUT...
 [Pekka Sammallahti:] "I have used the lowered-3-like letter for
voiced apical affricates and a similar letter with a loop in the descender
for the voiceless or semivoiced lenis affricates - -." - ...but I do think
that it is very beneficial to fit all the affricates into the same system,
i. e. to use either only single graphs or only digraphs in one text. So I
warmly support professor Sammallahti's principle of introducing a separate
grapheme, if something between c and ezh is needed.
 [Michael Everson:] "The situation with 'SS' being a capital form
of 'ß' is different, as the reason it would be a good idea is to allow
reversible casing operations. Such is not a requirement in FUPA." -
Originally I came across the problem of marking the affricates some years
ago, when I knew nothing about the Unicode (and very little about
codepages or such). I realized that there are texts like "Chrestomathia
ceremissica" by Gábor Bereczki where the FUPA is used as if it were an
ordinary orthography of a Uralic language: the names and the beginnings of
sentences are marked with a capital letter ("Chrestomathia Morduinica"
by László Keresztes does not follow this practice in order to avoid
confusion with the Mokshan so-called voiceless sonorants). Such use of the
FUPA indicates that, in prinpiple, somebody MIGHT need reversible casing
operations with the FUPA and that somebody MIGHT want to introduce capital
forms previously unknown to the FUPA system.

"Köszönöm a figyelmüket!" as they say in Hungary, and special thanks to
Michael Everson for the answer.

  Jouni Kortesharju <kortesha at cc.helsinki.fi>






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