Subject: Re: [Ietf-languages] Click letters in ISO 639-3 and Registry (long)

From: Michael Everson <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2018 19:26:55 +0000

I didn’t check the code point for 02BB. The comments I made about the relative size of these things with regard to the ordinary quotation marks remain valid. 

Michael

> On 28 Feb 2018, at 18:26, John Cowan <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Wed, Feb 28, 2018 at 7:36 AM, Michael Everson <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> There is a big issue with 02BC, actually. In real life it’s not possible to make use of it with it being identical in shape to 2019. In editions of Alice, The Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter, and The Hobbit in Hawaiian, and of Alice in other Polynesian languages, the glottal 02BC has to exist side by side with smart single and double quotes in reported speech. It is intolerably uncomfortable for native speakers to read such texts if 02BC is 100% the same size of the quotation marks.
> 
> Note that Hawaiian uses 02BB, the high-six shape, for its glottal stop, not 02BC, the high-nine shape.  This is also true in Samoan since 2012; other Polynesian languages accept either shape or leave the letter out altogether.  The IPA characters ʕ ʔ are graphically speaking the left and right letter apostrophes, exaggerated for legibility; their phonetic interpretations reflect the use of the apostrophes for transliteration of Arabic ayin and alef.
> 
> -- 
> John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        [email-masked]
> As we all know, civil libertarians are not the friskiest group around --
> comes from  forever being on the qui vive for the sound of jack-booted
> fascism coming down the pike.           --Molly Ivins
> _______________________________________________
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---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2018 16:23:16 -0700

Michael Everson wrote:

>> Note that Hawaiian uses 02BB, the high-six shape, for its glottal
>> stop, not 02BC, the high-nine shape.  This is also true in Samoan
>> since 2012 [...]
>
> I didn’t check the code point for 02BB. The comments I made about the
> relative size of these things with regard to the ordinary quotation
> marks remain valid.

Let's not worry for now about Hawaiian or Samoan, or U+02BB, or any of 
the other 130-some languages that have apostrophe-like characters in 
their name.

Let's focus on the apostrophe-like characters in the languages that have 
click letters in their name. There are only two such languages in the 
Registry:

Juǀʼhoan (which has an alternative name, Juǀʼhoansi)

ǂKxʼauǁʼein

Notice that in these names, the apostrophe-like characters do not fall 
at the beginning or end of the language name, where they might appear 
next to single quotation marks or other apostrophes. So we don't need to 
worry fir now about that typographical issue either.

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org

---

From: Arthur Reutenauer <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2018 00:40:30 +0100

> Juǀʼhoan (which has an alternative name, Juǀʼhoansi)

  Actually, it’s the same language :-)  Subtag [ktz].  Ethnologue has
the latter a dialect of the former, but in the registry we just have a
deprecated entry for ǂKxʼauǁʼein [aue], pointing to [ktz].

> Notice that in these names, the apostrophe-like characters do not fall at
> the beginning or end of the language name, where they might appear next to
> single quotation marks or other apostrophes. So we don't need to worry fir
> now about that typographical issue either.

  With the font used to display this email to me (Apple’s Monaco, I
think), the problem is rather to distinguish U+02BB and U+02BC.  They’re
just tiny floating dots, nearly identical.  Very odd.

	Best,

		Arthur

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From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2018 17:17:04 -0700

> deprecated entry for ǂKxʼauǁʼein [aue], pointing to [ktz].

The proposal is to fix the spelling of names for both entities, the 
active one and the deprecated (639-3: retired) one.

I know [aue] was retired in favor of [ktz]. The fact that these happen 
to be the only two with both clicks and "apostrophes" is an amusing 
coincidence.

> think), the problem is rather to distinguish U+02BB and U+02BC.
> They’re just tiny floating dots, nearly identical.  Very odd.

This is always a problem with small glyphs: ' ꞌ ʹ ʻ ʼ ʽ ˈ ‘ ’ ‛

Depending on one's viewpoint, this may or may not be a reason to worry 
about them at all. But if we are going to recommend click-letter 
spellings to the RA, for these two languages (three names) the 
recommended names will also include one of these characters (two for 
Kx), and we need to decide which to use.

---

From: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 10 Mar 2018 17:23:16 -0700

I wrote:

> Let's focus on the apostrophe-like characters in the languages that
> have click letters in their name.

On February 28, Mark Davis wrote:

> Probably best to leave those as \x{27} for now, and just change the
> clicks.

Do we just want to go with that?