Why incomplete subscript/superscript alphabet ?

[Julian Bradfield]

On 2016-10-10, Hans Åberg <haberg-1 at telia.com> wrote:
> It is possible to write math just using ASCII and TeX, which was the original idea of TeX. Is that want you want for linguistics?

I don't see the need to do everything in plain text. Long ago, I spent
a great deal of time getting my editor to do semi-wysiwyg TeX maths
(work later incorporated into x-symbol), but actually it's a waste of
time and I've given up. Working mathematicians know LaTeX and its control
sequences. Even my 12-year old uses LaTeX control sequences to
communicate with his online maths courses.

Because phonetics has a much small set of symbols, I do kwəɪt ləɪk
biːɪŋ eɪbl tʊ duː ðɪs, and because they're also used in non-specialist
writing, it's useful to have the symbols hacked into Unicode instead
of hacked into specialist fonts.
But subscripts? No need.

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