Talk:Click letter

Shape of bars for Lepsius and Krönlein

• Lepsius bars are in Italic type, so they are always inclined, but that doesn’t indicate how Lepsius used it in Roman type. The height of the glyphs goes from baseline to x-height.
• Johann Georg Krönlein, 1866, ǀAsa Testamens sida ǃkhūb tsĩ hui-aob Yesub χristub dis has the click letters in both Italic and Roman types, inclined in Italic and vertical in Roman. The height goes from baseline to around t-height in most cases (or slightly higher, but always lower than cap or ascender height), but there are some exceptions, first Italics like Lepsius’, then in some cases the letters go below the baseline (but might be due to printing issues). Furthermore, the type is the same as in other publications by Lepsius (it’s the same Latin chi as Lepsius’ Roman and Italic Latin chi).
• Johann Georg Krönlein, 1889, Wortschatz der Khoi-Khoin (Namaqua-Hottentotten) has the click letters inclined in the serif Italic type and inclined in the sans-serif upright type. The height goes from the baseline to around t-height in both upright and Italic. There might be exceptions, if one wants to check the whole book.

I don’t think it’s appropriate to approximate Lepsius’ glyphs with dotless i and have a note about the approximation. It’s probably better to represent them with today’s click letters and have a note about the difference between the glyphs (obviously not for ǀ́ vs. ǂ). Using dotless i for Lepsius’ glyphs would be pretty much like using dotless i for Krönlein’s glyphs with a note. Both intended to use the same letters and those have become whatever they are today in most fonts. We have to account for glyphic variation, which as shown occurred early on. --Moyogo/ (talk) 08:53, 17 December 2013 (UTC)

Wilhelm H. I. Bleek, 1862, A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages, Part 1, also uses Lepsius’ alphabet (but uses ǂ instead of ǀ́, looking like ≠) and uses approximative glyphs forshadowing the exclamation mark shape for ǃ/ǀ̣ (see also [1] 1870 and [2] 1864). Interestingly it also mentions what click letters other authors used. --Moyogo/ (talk) 08:43, 18 December 2013 (UTC)