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I am contributing sentences and translations in Choctaw (Chahta anumpa), but the standard orthography of putting a macron below nasal vowels is not working. I have not found any Unicode characters for vowels with macron or line below. When I try to use a combining character (U+0320, U+0331, U+0332), the line extends beyond the vowel and looks bad:
a+0320 = a̠
a+0331 = a̱
a+0332 = a̲
These vowel+unicode combinations look good in other webpages & Unicode-compliant apps like Notepad, Word, etc. But for some reason they don't display properly on any of the Tatoeba pages. I have taken to using a non-standard macron "above" the vowel (ā) to indicate nasalization until this issue can be resolved.
I just reported this in the bug tracker: https://github.com/Tatoeba/tatoeba2/issues/791
I'm afraid this problem is not specific to Tatoeba. I have had the same problem when combining IPA diacritic characters with normal letters on another site.
If it does work on some other sites, maybe it has something to do with fonts or something? I thought at first maybe it was a problem with the browser, but Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer all display it the same for me.
(edit: Copied this comment to Github. It seems relevant.)
Is ā used in Choctaw for other purposes? If so, it's going to be difficult to go through and clean up those sentences. If not, then the cleanup should at least be straightforward (provided you didn't also add sentences with U+0320, U+0331, U+0332). But I would think that a macron above the vowel would have the double problem of looking wrong and confusing readers. Faced with the same problem, I would go with one of the combinations that currently looks less than perfect, and use it consistently.
Primarily only standard Latin characters are used; however, underlined (or low-macron) vowels are used for nasal (some older texts use a superscript aⁿ). The vowel schwa is written ʋ or v (some older texts use ạ). Older texts also use ɬ or ɫ or ł for lateral fricative, the standard now is to write hl (lh before consonants).
As for editing the sentences, it is easy to edit them (since I own them and there are only a few so far). But I do not want to continue building sentences with ā (over-macron) - I would rather fix the site.
I agree with AlanF_US, maybe you should continue using U+0331 (combining macron below). At present, it may not look right, but the issue has been reported and will be fixed at some point in the future. And when it is, you will not have to go back and edit your sentences at all if you continue to use U+0331... that is maybe until they actually add the combined vowels to unicode.
I agree that when the low macron (U+0331) is fixed, it should fix all my sentences. So I will change them all to use this, even though it doesn't look perfect. Thanks for the feedback.
Isn't U+0320 the "more correct" one? At least that is the one used in IPA, where it has a different meaning, though?
Online, Choctaw speakers tend to use U+0331, though. I think the important thing, as has been stated before, is to stay consistent.
Someday, when they add the required character to Unicode, all the instances can be changed if need be.
If you feel like it you could also make a list with the sentences in question so you can easily find them later.
You can create a new list here:
https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentenc.../Choctaw_Irish
And you can add a sentence to it on the sentence page. It's the list icon right above the sentence.
You might also want to turn on the option "Remember the last list to which you assigned a sentence, and select it by default." in the settings.
https://tatoeba.org/eng/user/settings
I have all my Choctaw sentences in a list.
https://tatoeba.org/eng/sentences_lists/show/4716
> the line extends beyond the vowel and looks bad
[...]
> These vowel+unicode combinations look good in other webpages
Could you define “good” and “bad” by uploading some screenshots? What you see on your screen is likely different from what others see.
It certainly depends on the browser. It looks good in Safari on my iPhone, but bad on IE. On IE the macron below is positioned in the center on most sites, but on Tatoeba it appears of to the right, as he said above.
On the github page the low-macron displays properly.
https://github.com/Tatoeba/tatoeba2/issues/791
But on all the tatoeba.org pages it is displaced to the right.
I'm not sure how to include screenshots in this forum. I don't have a webpage that I can upload to. I'm happy to email anyone a screenshot.
How about Light Shot - http://prntscr.com/8oxmxs ?
Take a look at my profile picture. The letters under tatoeba is how I see it on my browser. The letters under github is how it is supposed to look.
I believe an online image uploading service like imgur.com or tinypic.com should also suffice if all you need is a place to upload.