Re: ASCII convention

Yusuf B Gursey wrote:

[Pointless quoting deleted. Why can't language specialists learn
 to quote properly?]

I did indicate the *reason* I asked for ASCII.

You didn't. Here's your original question, repeated for your convenience. It is very sloppy writing, and confused. At the end,
you say that using /.../ is not possible an ASCII post; this
doesn't make much sense:

what is the recommended convention for representing *letters* which may
not be identical to the phonemes? [ ... ]is for actual speech, / ... /
is for phonemes, how about the just the leters, asuming an appropriate
transliteration system? i.e. "in an inscription one finds y - w - s -
f" (but do this more economically). in article, a well known arabist
recommends italics, and criticisez an author using /... / (IIRC such a
crticiism was voiced in an earlier post) which is not possible in an
ASCII post. so how do it?

I thought that graphemes
were represented in italics *always*.

I wonder what made you think so - and why you now say you asked for a convention in plain ASCII text if you thought that you italics is *always* used. Italics can be used for ASCII characters, of course, but not in plain text.

it turns out only to be the
convention of the particular article I was reading.

No, as the discussion has shown, there are many styles, but the particular style (or convention) of using italics is _not_ limited
to one particular article. It's rather common in printed matter.

If the question is really about _plain text_ and specifically _Usenet postings_ (limitation to ASCII is rather really irrelevant here), then there's a particular thing to note about using the solidus (slash) character as a delimiter on Usenet. People often use /.../ in Usenet
postings to simulate the use of italics, usually for emphasis. It is so common that to many people, /.../ _means_ emphasis here. Moreover, several newsreaders display the string in italics, typically still showing the solidus characters as well (somewhat illogically, but this may help in situations where the intent is not to simulate italics and
the data just happens to contain /.../ for some readon).

So if you write /f/, then some people will see it literally as solidus, f, solidus in normal font, and some people will see it so that the
letter f is in italics, usually with the solidus characters displayed too. This is a potential source of confusion.
.

Relevant Pages

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