As someone whose background is in linguistics rather than type design and who has thus read lots of material containing phonetic characters, you’d think I’d have better intuitions on this topic but I don’t so I thought I’d ask...
The International Phonetic Alphabet employs a variety of letters which are rotated, reversed, or inverted versions of standard latin letters, and historically these letters (at least the rotated varieties) were actually created by simply rotating sorts, but I’m wondering if this is really the appropriate approach when designing type from scratch.
In some cases, rotating a character produces perfectly reasonable results. For example, open o (0x254) can be produced by simply rotating lowercase c:
However, in other cases, it seems that simple rotation doesn't harmonize as well with the latin alphabet as it could. Below are examples of rotated m and h (0x26F and 0x265), along with an alternate version which involves more than simple rotation (n.b. all examples are based on Adobe Text):
It seems to me that the rightmost instances in the above examples harmonize better with the latin alphabet than the center versions. However, a survey of various phonetic fonts indicates that the center version seems to be far more common (in fact, of the faces I looked at only John Hudson's Brill didn't use purely rotated versions).
What I'm uncertain about is whether departing from the more traditional forms (which as I said often resulted from simply rotating sorts rather than redesigning characters) may introduce a source of unnecessary confusion and whether that should override some personal notion of ‘harmony’
Thoughts?
André
Comments
The problem is that linguists are not type designers. They want to represent some sound with a unique character and somehow decide that it's best indicated with a regular character turned upside down. So that is what they do, never mind stress direction and what-if-it-needs-italicizing.
So what they expect to see is the plain character, mirrored and/or rotated. The only thing you can hope for is to educate them and explain it should be treated, design-wise, as a totally new kind of glyph.
I imagine the first designers of the /w glyph faced similar backlash. "VVhy not just dravv it as two vv's, that has alvvvvays vvvvorked bevvore!"
Another somewhat related topic is how much the IPA should actually harmonize with the body text? To my mind words set with IPA symbols should stand out, similar to the Paragraph sign. What I mean is don't linguists prefer IPA to be set in a very limited set of fonts, so they are instantly recognizable? And concequently only in roman weight, with no italics and so on. Like computer code.
André
André
André
(Off topic:) André, can you please refrain from repeating “André” at the end of each post? Your name is already at the beginning of your posts. It’s a waste of space. It is not customary practice here.
The phonetic characters are not symbols but letters. These letters are a part of the (extended) Latin writing system. This needs to get materialized by the font design. Because the correspondence of the phonetic letterforms with the common a to z letterforms is of the essence for understanding what the phonetic letters represent, so it is not only desirable but neccessary to make the relation between the ordinary and the special letters visible and thus enable the recipient to draw the correct conclusions.
It's acceptable, but I find a rotated c often tends to be less stable on the baseline, and will tend to have a slight optical tilt to the left, so needs some adjustment to make an overall fuller, rounder shape than the c, more closely related to the o. For the same reason, it helps to make the lower terminal a bit larger, reaching more to the left. Here's the Brill Roman c, rotated c, open o, and o, for comparison.
[from http://tiro.com/John/Hudson-Brill-DECK.pdf ]
Fascinating stuff!
Pullum & Ladusaw call this 'barred dotless j' and note:
'Typographically, a turned lower-case f, but better thought of as a variant of ⟨j⟩, since in English words like job a ⟨j⟩ represents a palato-alveolar affricate [dʒ] that is at least somewhat similar to IPA [ɟ], though not identical.'
Not an overwhelmingly strong case, but reasonable.
My own reasoning in designing the character is that if I were writing the letter there would be no distinction of the main body between ɟ and j.
I think the main issue here isn't with <ɟ> but rather with <ʄ>. I agree that <ʄ> should follow the same design principles as <ɟ>, but it often is not. To me, the most sensible approach to the bar would be to treat <ɟ>, <ʄ>, and <ɨ> identically. Instead, you often see <ʄ> with a double-bar, as if it were constructed from <f> combined with a rotated <f>. I think the issue here is simply that [ʄ] is an uncommon sound with which many designers might not be familiar.
Or are linguists unconcerned with that, given that ƒ is not used in IPA?
Which is what you seem to be saying.
IPA characters are different from the letters of the alphabet. They are used, like letters, to write texts belonging to languages. But each character stands for a sound, whereas letters are conventional signs used to represent words according to the prevailing orthography for a language. Different languages may use a letter in different ways: thus, in English, j is a consonant related to /ch/; in others, it functions like the English letter y in creating dipthongs. And an orthography may only be partially phonetic, with the degre varying between languages.
The IPA notation writes the sounds in the same manner regardless of which language is being transcribed.
The phonetic characters are typographically letters rather than sorts, so they're not symbols in the sense that @ or & are symbols. But in other senses, their function does differ in a limited and hence subtle manner from that of ordinary letters.
The English word ‘cat’ is pronounced as [kʰæt] or [kʰæʔ], depending on dialect.
I really don’t want to see the IPA characters in a separate typeface. The above is a single sentence, and should be set in a single font.
If you ever want typographic nightmares, flip through any conference proceedings or working papers volume in linguistics from the eighties or nineties. These usually wanted camera ready text from their authors, and since major operating systems of the time didn't include much in way of multi-lingual or phonetic fonts, the results were horrendous, with text in one typeface, non-English Latin examples and phonetic transcriptions in another, often mixing more than one typeface in the same word.
In fact, it was this situation that first got me interested in type design in the first place. Armed with only Fontographer and Minion (at the time, one of the few fonts with a relatively large character set which I considered suitable for text), I managed to produce what might have been the first typographically (though not necessarily theoretically) coherent MA Theses of the early nineties.
[EDIT: I don’t think I still even have the various Minion Supplement fonts I created. I suspect they were probably awful, but they were decent enough to fool a crappy 300 dpi LaserPrinter.]
[EDIT -- OK, you got me curious so I did some digging. It would appear that the University of Calgary started archiving MA theses in electronic form in 2005, but since there was no requirement for electronic submissions prior to that, they’ve retroactively added a catalogue entry, but since there was no .pdf submitted it is ‘embargoed’ until 2999 (which I assume just means forever). So that would suggest that no, there is no electronic copy available anywhere, just the paper copy which I submitted at the time. This is probably for the best since I suspect the contents of said thesis were embarrassingly bad.]