From: "Ernest Cline" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > (Besides, I think unifying the phonetic > symbols with Latin was a mistake done solely to ease the transition > from legacy encodings.)
But the phonetics notation allowed by IPA is still useful to represent languages that still don't have a defined orthography. When time elapses, and litteracy levels in that language progresses, such phonetic notations will tend to be borrowed as a standard way to write that language, and then extended to include other Latin script features such as letter cases. Some time in the future, I bet that most IPA symbols will evolve into plain Latin cased letter pairs, if they are kept in the orthograph. Nobody knows how a newly written language will evolve: historically, the difficulty to use some complex combinations promoted the use of digraphs, but when Unicode and font technologies allow supporting more characters, it seems less urgent now to adopt digraph if it is just simpler to keep the phonetic distinctions within the adopted orthography, avoiding initially the many spelling ambiguities that exist in English or French and result from a long history of fast evolution of spoken languages but with very slowly evolving orthographies.
