On the upcoming LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL Q

[Philippe Verdy]

This still does not mean that these smallcaps are different from the normal
Latin characters they represent in this case : "ADV" for example is an
abbreviated form of the standard English word "ADVERB", just using
smallcaps as a stylistic variation not really borrowed by individual
characters "A", "D" or "V" themselves, but for the whole abbreviation.
Compare this to the stylistic convention of using superscripts for final
letters "st" of ordinal numeric values such as "1st". or the extra use of
bold, italic, underlining to makup some intersegmental semantics. Isolately
on each character, these style carry no semantic at all, they are only
meaningful in contexts spanning larger segments of text (syllable or
words/morphemes, independantly of letters composing them, which may be in
any script and may use all other possible combining diacritics.

To encode the character, you need to demonstrate that the distinct style is
meaningful for the isolated character itself and sets its own semantic.

Otherwise we would need to reencode all existing base letters (also
precomposed letters using diacritics) in many variants: superscript,
subscript, bold, italic, underlined, or a combination of these, which would
mean hundreds of thousands new characters. Segmental notations carried by
style variants applied to ranges of characters are out of scope of the
standard because this is in fact a national convention (and in fact it is
not a standard and there are multiple choices to represent these
distinctions, without affecting the meaning of indicidual letters in these
spans).

So just use some style markup in an external protocol and let's keep the
characters unified with their normal style version. Exceptions were made
and accepted in Unicode only because of
* roundtrip compability with legacy encoding standards, e.g. with
superscript "a" and "o" (masculine and feminine ordinal terminators), or
the precombined abbreviation No. for "numero" ,
* or for maths symbols, which are not really letters and that need to be
distinguished from normal human languages without even being affected by
their grammar or orthography or altered by tools such as spelling
correctors.
The cost for desunifying many letters is worse than using a document-local,
or language-specific convention for using the proper markup styles.

There will unavoidably exist documents that will reuse the few encoded
variants, but in my opinion these documnets are just hacking the standard
when they should better use style or semantic markup.


2016-12-26 10:38 GMT+01:00 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?
> >
> >
>
>
>
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