Michael Everson asked: > Your solution then, for Athapascan orthography?
First of all, the preferred spellings are Athabascan (or Athabaskan [ANLC] or Athapaskan [Smithsonian]). There are *many* Athabascan orthographies, not just one, of course. See: http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/orthography.html for a whole series of practical orthographies for Alaskan Athabascan languages. Those do *not* make case distinctions, per se, but when set in type, they often make use of English conventions for capitalizing initial words and such. And they use U+0027 for the glottal stop (and ejectives). That's why they are "practical" orthographies. They work fine with ASCII. Athabascan languages in Canada are also written with practical orthographies such as these, as well as with more technical orthographies. And of course in Canada, some Athabascan languages are also written with syllabics (which also don't make case distinctions). When using these practical orthographies with apostrophes for glottal stop, casing has never come into question, as far as I can tell. Nobody is agitating for an uppercase apostrophe. Technical orthographies are based on Americanist usage generally, or more recently, IPA. Americanist usage showed many forms for a glottal stop, including directional apostrophes, but also all the variants shown in Pullum and Ladusaw. Many of these were none other than font hacks (or literally the result of hacking or filing the dot off a question mark on a typewriter keyboard) of a question mark to get the appropriate shapes. You also find orthographies that substituted an actual question mark for the glottal stop because a dotless form was not available. For an IPA-based example, see: http://www.uaf.edu/anlc/langs/papers/holton.pdf a dissertation on Tanacross (Tanana) phonology. For these, and thousands of other documents published on Athabascan languages over the last century, there was just a glottal stop -- not an uppercase and a lowercase glottal stop. And that glottal stop is represented by U+0294 in Unicode. And anyone who has represented any Athabascan data with a glottal stop (as opposed to an apostrophe or a question mark) in the last decade has been using U+0294 LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP for it. The glyph for the glottal stop in Unicode is the (IMO) ugly cap-height glyph with the serif base. Why? Well, that is pretty easy to determine. It is because that is what the IPA settled on for their prescriptive preference for the shape of a glottal stop. (Note: for a *glottal stop*, not for a *capital glottal stop*. The IPA does not have casing distinctions.) The prestige of the IPA specification is such that many fonts have used that form as well. And, indeed, it influenced the choice for the Unicode representative glyph, which in turn has influenced what OS vendors have put in their fonts. So, while there are multiple different glyphs in print for a glottal stop (see Pullum & Ladusaw for different examples), most of which don't *look like* capital letters, the IPA glyph has become the preferred one, simply because IPA prefers it. And that is unfortunate, because that one glyph is the one that people think *looks like* a capital letter, and which thus causes the confusion when an orthographic innovation decides it needs to introduce casing for it. Now I presume from Michael's assertion that there is some Athabascan community *somewhere* that has started to make an initial case distinction for glottal stop, and that in the fonts they use, their uppercase glottal stop *looks like* the IPA glottal stop, and that for the body text they innovated a miniature of same. Hence the conclusion that we must treat the existing form as the *capital* and need to encode a new lowercase form. That, however, is utterly backward. It is clear that in these cases, following 100 years of monocase usage of glottal stop, that the innovation (as in many adaptations of IPA) is to create an uppercase letter to go with the lowercase one. [By the way, I would like to get references to the actual users and examples of their materials, to see just how widespread this innovation actually is.] In terms of font design, I concur with John Hudson's sense of what would look harmonious as an uppercase/lowercase pairing for a glottal stop in a typical font. However, to accord with general IPA usage and the existing fonts showing U+0294 should stay as they are. Then, *if* it turns out that there is a convincing case to be made for separate encoding of an uppercase glottal stop for such Athabascan usage as may turn up, then the least damaging approach would be, for the code charts, to use the kinds of uppercase glyph models used in similar instances of after-the-fact uppercase inventions based on IPA or other phonetic alphabets and usages. Some good models to follow would be: 0182/0183 b with topbar, 018B/018C d with topbar, and 0222/0223 ou, all of which involve an invented case pair where somebody felt they had to have a "capital" letter, but where the lowercase letter was already a cap-height one. If this is then augmented with examples showing good typographic practice and actual examples of text distinguishing uppercase and lowercase glottal stop, that should be sufficient to let people then design and use their fonts as desired, without disturbing the identity of the already existing encoded character, U+0294 LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP. --Ken
