Re: ASCII convention

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>
> Christopher Culver wrote:
>
> > I have always understood that graphemes are supposed to be marked up
> > with angle brackets ("<w> represents a semivowel in English").
>
> Do you mean angle brackets or the characters "<" (less than sign) and
> ">" (greater than sign), which you actually used? They are quite
> different, in appearance and by their properties as characters in
> standards. Angle brackets are typically larger and have an obtuse angle,
> and they are classified as punctuation characters, whereas "<" and ">"
> are classified as mathematical operators. The angle brackets are mainly
> used in mathematics, creating a need for clearly distinguishing them
> from the operator symbols.
>
> Angle brackets do not belong to ASCII, of course, and they are somewhat
> difficult to produce in most programs, and printing or display could be
> a problem, too. It also debatable which characters you should for angle
> brackets, since Unicode has several pairs of characters that might be
> interpreted as angle brackets in some sense. It is understandable that
> "<" and ">" are widely used instead of them, but they really _aren't_
> angle brackets.
>
> When writing for general audience, it is probably better to use
> quotation marks (according to the rules of the language you are writing
> in) rather than any special notation: The letter "w" often represents a
> semivowel in English. (Replace the ASCII quotation marks by correct
> quotation marks whenever possible.)

Those three paragraphs are irrelevant to the question of what to use in
ASCII.

If, however, you refer to typography where special fonts (containing
angle brackets) are not available, and if you're clever enough to use a
Mac, the Single Guillemets provide a very reasonable substitute (see my
chapter in the Blackwell *Handbook of Linguistics*. Unfortunately, they
turn into Icelandic in Windows: instead of <xyz> write Ðxyzð.

Quotation marks already have other functions that are likely to occur in
the same text as the mentioning of letters.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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