Michael Everson scripsit:
They were published in Bantu Studies in 1925 in an article by a
rather important scholar in the field of African linguistics.
We don't encode characters according to the clout of the user, or the Apple logo would have been in Unicode long since. :-)
False analogy. The Apple logo is a logo. Phonetic characters are phonetic characters.
> Effort and expense was made to cut the letters for the publication.
And today, if I were reprinting it, I'd commission a digital font (your effort, my expense) and put the characters in the PUA.
Not if you wanted, as an Africanist, to be able to represent the text as it was originally written.
> The sounds they represent are idiosyncratic and difficult todescribe, much less write.
I think that characters used in a single document by a single scholar, however prestigious, can fairly be described as idiosyncratic to him.
You don't know whether or not they were only used in a single document. You know only that I *own* that single document. You are declaring the characters guilty until proved innocent. That's antagonistic.
If I decided to start using thorn instead of theta in my otherwise IPA transcriptions, that would be an idiosyncratic use of it.
Plenty of Germanist transcriptions use thorn. In any case, the analogy isn't relevant, as both thorn and theta are encoded and available for use.
If instead I used OVERCLOCKED HOOCHIMADINGER SYMBOL, that would be even more idiosyncratic.
(LATIN LETTER OWL, indeed.)
COMBINING SEAGULL BELOW, indeed.
This symbol is interesting, by the way. Asmus says it's similar to something the Japanese use for telephone answering machines. I don't know about that, though it looks familar to me. I wonder what Doke's source for it was.
> Personal? No: he published.
Fair enough.
Thank you.
> Novel? Perhaps(in 1925); Doke is likely to have devised them.
They are just as novel today as they were eighty years ago; I well remember how astonished you and I were, looking over the text.
I was astonished because I hadn't seen them before. That does not mean I didn't believe that they weren't worthy of encoding. Just because I hadn't seen them before doesn't mean they don't exist and aren't worthy of encoding either. Khoisian phonology is rather esoteric, after all.
> Private use? Beserious, John. That's a pretty ridiculous suggestion.
I am serious. The PUA is the proper place for these things.
I am gobsmacked. On what grounds are these not characters? They are not glyph representations of other characters. The PRE-PALATAL N is described in terms of its phonology as being neither N nor N WITH LEFT HOOK.
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Michael Everson * * Everson Typography * * http://www.evertype.com
