Re: [css-text] letter-spacing tests

On 10/10/14 1:31 PM, John Cowan wrote:

> Cool presentation!  I note, however, that AFAIK cedilla is never used for
> nasalized vowels (but ogonek is, of course); the only cedilla vowels I know
> of are the mysterious e-cedilla inherited from ISO 10646 draft 1 and the
> o-cedilla (rounded back low vowel) of Marshallese.

When I was researching orthographies for African languages in 1998, at 
Northwestern University's excellent African Studies library, I came 
across a fair number of examples of cedilla used to indicate 
nasalisation in publications directly reproduced from typescripts. My 
guess is that this represented the limitations of the typewriters being 
used by linguists in the field: if they'd had access to ogonek they 
would presumably have used it. More recently, tilde seems to have been 
favoured for nasalisation in Africa.

Whenever we've been asked to make fonts or advise on character sets for 
African languages, I've always recommended providing for both ogonek and 
cedilla, just in case the latter has persisted in any orthographies.

J.

Received on Friday, 10 October 2014 20:54:36 UTC