Re: ASCII convention

Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
>
> Peter T. Daniels wrote:
>
> > Believe it or not, sometimes the previous material is relevant.
>
> That doesn't mean that it should all be quoted, on Usenet or otherwise.
> Especially on Usenet, an interested reader can check back what had been
> written. The purpose of quoting on Usenet is to indicate which
> statement(s) you are commenting on, not to carry all the previous
> discussion until message size explodes.

The above is irrelevant to the topic, but I'll leave it in anyway.

> >> People often use /.../ in Usenet
> >
> > "People" who are linguists do no such thing, because / / has had a
> > specific meaning since at least the 1940s and maybe earlier.
>
> Linguists do not dominate Usenet, and Usenet software has often been
> tuned according to what is common rather than the practices and rules of
> some special areas.

Linguists (and wannabes) dominate sci.lang.

> >>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.
> >
> > Then it's lousy software.
>
> Many people think just the opposite. Anyway, it's a reality in this
> medium. Just as it's a reality that by writing *foo* you make some
> people see foo in bold, some people see *foo* in bold, and some people
> just *foo* with no typographic feature.

You seem to suggest that html is acceptable in newsgroups. It isn't.

> > And Yusuf's original question, which you first snipped
>
> I didn't snip it; I commented on a comment to it, and quoted just the
> part I commented on, in good Usenet practice.
>
> > and then had to restore,
>
> I had to remind of it, after it had been claimed to have explained the
> reason, which it didn't, at least not in any clear way.

It was clear to everyone else.

> > is relevant far beyond the "usenet" (whatever that is) world.
>
> The original question did not specify its scope, and it has been
> interpreted in different ways. My reason for commenting was, in part,
> that it had been interpreted as a Usenet-only question, and I wished
> to raise a broader question.
>
> > Angle brackets are used for transliterations, slants for phonemes,
> > brackets for phones, braces for morphemes, and pipes for underlying
> > forms. (This last may have been an invention of the 1960s; the others
> > all go back at least a generation before that.)
>
> I'm still uncertain of what you, or others, mean by "angle brackets".

Have you already forgotten that you provided a precise description of
what they are?

(To which I will add that in some fonts, they are right- rather than
obtuse-angled.)

> My question on this was already explained away as not applying to
> Usenet (or "ASCII", as you put it - maybe you meant ASCII encoded plain
> text). But if the notations are that old, then the question really
> remains what the characters are. That is, what is used in printed
> matter, or in other presentation of good typographic quality?
>
> We can probably identify "slant" with "/", "brackets" with "[" and "]",
> and "braces" with "{" and "}", i.e. with certain ASCII characters.
> But are "<" and ">" the same as the traditional angle brackets, or
> are they just replacements used for them on typewriters and computer
> text with limited character repertoire, much the same way as we use
> e.g. the ASCII hyphen-minus "-" as a replacement for dash, minus,
> and a couple of other characters?

Answered by your own self.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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