Talk:The New Student's Reference Work/Vol I/Key to Pronunciation

Composed characters

This chart seems to implement some of the difficult dot-macron characters using composed characters which my text editor seems to recognize but which the browser doesn't really render well. I think a single Latin-character substitutions would be preferable, perhaps ắ (ă with an acute accent) as a substitute for the dot-macron-a. Similar substitutions are available for i (ï with an acute accent) and u (ü with a grave accent). A macronned vowel with an acute accent would be a good substitute across all the characters, but I can only find it for "e" and "o" as was apparently the case with the editor(s) who formulated this chart. For the macronned and breved "oo" I think using ōō and ŏŏ would be preferable to the current solution. And perhaps ÿ could be substituted for y-breve. Bob Burkhardt (talk) 16:52, 4 August 2010 (UTC)

I find the Key to pronunciation for Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921) seems to have better solutions: ā̇ instead of ā́; ī̇ instead of ī́; ū̇ instead of ū́. These again seem to be composed (when I do a backward delete, the first delete turns it into a macronned character and the second delete disposes of it), and I can't find them in Wikipedia's Latin characters in Unicode. Their rendering in my display is a better match for the facsimile characters, but they seem trickier to copy. Sometimes I can only copy in edit mode. Single characters copied from the Unicode chart referenced seem to be easier to manipulate. Bob Burkhardt (talk) 13:51, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

An attempt to do a replacement for these three characters (not committed) worked fine in the body of the key, but when I tried to add an advisory about the new substitutions in the header notes, they rendered with only the macron. So since the control is questionable for me, I will omit the edit for now. Bob Burkhardt (talk) 14:31, 4 October 2010 (UTC)