Re: Delimiters <-- Re: IIT (Madras) point of view

Nicholas Bodley wrote:

>
> {This message should come to you encoded in ISO 8859-15}
>
> Summary: Being strict about character encoding in Qalam messages.
>
> On Tue, 22 Mar 2005 23:22:22 -0500, Peter T. Daniels
> <grammatim@...> wrote:
>
> >
> > Richard Wordingham wrote:
>
> >> Amateur linguist at work! Linguists use different brackets to
> >> indicate at what level they are talking - / / for phonemes (the
> >> underlying contrasting units in speech), [ ] for phones (the actual
> >> sounds that emerge), < > for spelling, // // for archiphonemes
> >> (phonemes except that the context denies the possibility of saying
> >> precisely which one, as in the lack of contrast between /s//d/ and
> >> /s//t/ at the start of an English word) and /// /// for morphemes
> >> (elemental bits of word with meaning, as in <meaning> = ///mean///
> >> ///ing///). The brackets may be omitted if the context does not
> >> require it.
> >
> > Respectively / /, [ ], < > (better Ð ð), | |, { } in traditional
> > notation.
>
> That helps, and also mystifies.[1]
>
> Something looks weird, here. Peter (Daniels') message was sent, according
> to its full header, encoded in Latin-1, but when I read it, I saw
> "(better Ð ð)" (quotes added here, of course), which looks improbable.
> What I see after "better" is a capital eth (decimal 208), followed by a
> space and a small eth (Decimal 240). Surely, those are not delimiters?

I see exactly what I typed: single guillemets. OTOH when you Windows
users type edhs and thorns, I see other things. Mac and Windows standard
fonts differ.

> OK: by any chance, were « and » meant?
>
> If, perhaps, single guillemets (139 decimal and 155) were meant, please
> send in utf-8!

I have no idea whether I can do that, and no interest in learning
whether I can.

> Those numerical codes, 139 and 155, are specific to Windows-1252 (and
> probably several other Windows 125x encodings). Unicode 3.0 says that 139
> (U+008b) is ISO 6429 "partial line down" (my quotes), and, wonder of
> wonders, 155 (U+009B) (!) is the famous "control sequence introducer" (!),
> beloved by printer-control-code hackers of the past. My recollection is
> that it was often entered from the keyboard as two sequential keystrokes,
> <Esc>, then [ .
>
> <mode chat>

<MS-specific chat deleted>

> [1] For what it's worth, not a lot, I use [ ] to define search-engine
> strings in messages (easier than saying "without quotes", the more-common
> case); also occasionally for other delimiters, in preference to " "
> followed by a disclaimer. I use { } for my in-line brief editorial
> comments, because those are quite unlikely to be found in documents I
> normally deal with. Then, of course, I use < > to delimit URLs/URIs.

The delimiters I laid out were in use in linguistics decades before
personal computers were thought of. The greater/less than angles already
refer to diachronic processes ("becomes"/"comes from"), so it is
disconcerting to see them used in place of real angle brackets for
transliterations. The closest we have to real angle brackets in standard
fonts is single-guillemets.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...