Benct Philip Jonsson wrote:
> Unfortunately you'd have to use combining diacritics most of
> the time. There is U+1DC4 COMBINING MACRON-ACUTE which might
> be used in combination with these for long stressed vowels.
That one doesn't even appear to be in Arial Unicode MS or Microsoft Sans
Serif.
> Actually it is not much of an issue IMO, but I see no reason
> why you can't use IPA characters:
>
> | Front: i e æ ø y
> | Back: ɯ ə a o u
>
> which BTW all have corresponding capitals Æ Ø Ɯ Ǝ.
I may end up using ø for /@/ (as in the second of the two relays where I
used Minza), which at least has a precomposed character with acute
accent ǿ. Hmm, it seems that ǽ is also supported in the common Windows
fonts; I wonder which language uses ǿ and ǽ?
> Although Ǝ seems to properly be the capital of ɘ I much
> prefer it to Ə. It is not altogether satisfying IMHO to
> have ɯ and w in the same orthography (which one is 'double
> u'?), but the problem with Ɨɨ is that there's no dotless
> ɨ to use with diacritics. You might use U+1D7B LATIN SMALL
> CAPITAL LETTER I WITH STROKE at a pinch.
At least Minza doesn't have a /w/, so that wouldn't be a problem, but I
don't like the idea of ɯ (Vietnamese ư would look better).
> It just strikes me that you can use something similar to the
> system for length and stress marking used in some Swedish
> dictionaries and educational material:
>
> | short unstressed: ö (no subscript)
> | short stressed: ọ̈ (dot below)
> | long stressed: ö̱ (macron below)
>
> The snag is that in Swedish length can occur only combined
> with (primary or secondary) stress. If you need a system
> without that limitation you may perhaps use
>
> | short unstressed: ö
> | short stressed: ö̯ (inverted breve)
> | long unstressed: ọ̈
> | long stressed: ö̱
I've been trying to figure out if length is predictable from stress or
vice versa. I think I can predict the length of unstressed vowels at least.
> An alternative might be to use the IPA stress mark, perhaps
> placed directly *after* the stressed vowel
>
> | short unstressed: ö
> | short stressed: öˈ
> | long unstressed: ö̱
> | long stressed: ö̱ˈ
>
> Graphically I'd prefer a slightly slanting line like a
> prime. (Which for some reason is lacking in DejaVu Serif!)
> It may then alternate with superscript acute on vowels
> without umlaut. That presupposes you don't use prime or
> apostrophe for something else.
The problem with prime is that some fonts only have U+02B9, but others
only have U+2032.
> Is it only I, BTW, who likes the idea of ẅ for [H] and ẇ
> for [u\_^]?
For some reason I used to have ÿ for [H] and ẅ for [M\] (e.g. in
1980's-era spelling of Olaetian). But ẅ for [H] makes sense from analogy
with ü for [y].