Peter Constable wrote:
> >The point is that encodings currently used for French have
> none of these.
>
> Well, then, just do what the French do: don't use any of
> them, even though you may be tempted to use some.
> [...]
> >The ideal for me, rather than adding the missing "e" and
> "i", would be to
> >delete the existing "a" and "o".
>
> So, at least in principle, you're open to the suggestion I
> offer above.
Yes and no.
I have to reiterate a point here: for this kind of abbreviations it is not
possible to do without superscript in Italian, not even in ASCII e-mails.
I elaborated more on this in a reply to Antoine Leca. However, if "ª" and
"º" (or superscript) are not available, Italians can choose other ways of
writing ordinals (e.g. Roman numerals), but we would never write them with
ordinary letters, like "3o", "3a", "3i", "3e".
> So I'm inclined to propose my ideas for phonetics strictly
> for the purpose of phonetics.
What do you plan to propose for phonetic modifier letters "<sup>a",
"<sup>o" and "<sup>i":
1) Will you propose three new code points?
2) will you propose to unify them with U+00AA, U00BA and U+2071?
I favor solution 1, on the basis that superscript letters as used in
linguistics are too much different logically from superscript letters used
in everyday orthography.
However, if you are determined to go for solution 2, and the UTC accepts it,
I wonder whether it would be wiser to drop my proposal. In this case, the
missing feminine plural indicator should probably better be unified with the
"<sup>e" in your set of modifiers.
_ Marco
