On the upcoming LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL Q

[Yifán Wáng]

> These are traditionally set in small-caps, not capitals. If the phonologists
> are getting small-caps into plain text, why not the morphologists? If the
> only argument for Q is that there is an  /ʀ/, why not the full set, and then
> you can write any morphological tag? The chance of confusing "CON" with a
> word is greater than that of /Q/ or [Q], if anything.

Let me tidy it up a bit.

You may be under impression that the letter has something to do with
morphology, but my argument is that the original "Letter for
representation of morpheme in Japanese" is a misnomer and this letter
is totally unrelated to morphological context.

This kind of letters are used to describe phonological representation
of words like /deɴkoʜseQka/ in the same way we describe an English
word /bætəlʃɪp/. The letters are represented in small capital because
they are different from the sound what we usually associate with N, H
or Q. (Actually, their phonetic values vary wildly according to
adjacent phonemes.) You can substitute ordinary upper cases for them,
but they are merely substitution in the same way you type /?/ instead
of /ʔ/, or upside-down G instead of /ŋ/, because of the lack of
typographical assets.

In morphological literature, few authors bother to use these notations
since they don't matter in this level of discussion. The word form I
mentioned above would be just transcribed as "denkōsekka" and glossed
in the next line.

Finally, small capitals in the Leipzig rules, I believe, are just
stylistic alteration. For example, when you write ᴀᴅᴠ (all small
capital), the letters still stand for ordinary A, D and V, for this is
obviously the abbreviation of "adverb". It's more like the whole
sequence ADV made shrunken in "small caps" mode or style, which is a
parallel operation to italicization or boldification. Since the
semantic difference is not inherent to the character itself, I don't
think Unicode people would treat them as another set of letters in
this case.


2016-12-26 18:38 GMT+09:00 Leonardo Boiko <leoboiko at gmail.com>:
> I meant that morphological glosses (such as the Leipzig standard) style tags
> in small-caps. Like this:
>
>     yukkuri-ni yom-i-mas-i-ta
>     carefully-ADV read-CON-POL-CON-PRF
>
> These are traditionally set in small-caps, not capitals. If the phonologists
> are getting small-caps into plain text, why not the morphologists? If the
> only argument for Q is that there is an  /ʀ/, why not the full set, and then
> you can write any morphological tag? The chance of confusing "CON" with a
> word is greater than that of /Q/ or [Q], if anything.
>
> 2016/12/26 3:28 "Yifán Wáng" <747.neutron at gmail.com>:
>
>> Agreed with Yifán Wáng... But I wonder about the need for the character in
>> the first place. Are we going to add a full small-caps set, too, given its
>> use in morphological glosses? Isn't it enough to use a regular 'Q' in
>> plain-text, and style to small caps in rich text?
>
> No, it's not in "morphological glosses" but phonological notations
> such as /yuQkuri/. In morphological discussions, phonological details
> are usually ignored and they just write down the surface forms.
>
>> I can see the rationale for mathematical bold, given that a regular-weight
>> plain-text character would stand for a different thing in mathematical
>> formulæ. But there's no way a capital Q would ever be confused as anything
>> other than the phoneme, in a Japanese phonological transcription.
>
> I don't think Q is, but it should be in unison with its fellows /ɴ/,
> /ʀ/, /ʜ/ etc. Some books make all of them capitals, but others all
> small capitals.
> Making into small capitals avoids possible confusions with variables
> like /C/ or /V/.
>
> 2016-12-26 5:03 GMT+09:00 Leonardo Boiko <leoboiko at gmail.com>:
>> Agreed with Yifán Wáng... But I wonder about the need for the character in
>> the first place. Are we going to add a full small-caps set, too, given its
>> use in morphological glosses? Isn't it enough to use a regular 'Q' in
>> plain-text, and style to small caps in rich text?
>>
>> I can see the rationale for mathematical bold, given that a regular-weight
>> plain-text character would stand for a different thing in mathematical
>> formulæ. But there's no way a capital Q would ever be confused as anything
>> other than the phoneme, in a Japanese phonological transcription.
>>
>> 2016/12/25 17:56 "Yifán Wáng" <747.neutron at gmail.com>:
>>
>> Please excuse my serial posting.
>>
>> I recently noticed the subhead given to the LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL
>> Q in the following document (at A7AF) is "Letter for representation of
>> morpheme in Japanese".
>> http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2016/16381-n4778r-pdam1-2-charts.pdf
>>
>> However, to my knowledge, the letter is required for describing a
>> "phoneme" of Japanese that isn't tied to specific "morphemes" (~
>> "words"). I have contacted the original writer of the proposal:
>> http://www.unicode.org/L2/L2015/15241-small-cap-q.pdf
>> and he agrees with me in this regard.
>>
>> Thus I suppose "Letter for Japanese phonology" would be more desired a
>> heading for this character, though subheads are not normative. What
>> are your thoughts?
>>
>>
>
>