Archiphonemes

Guidelines

• Archiphonemes should be a single character.
• Archiphonemes in lexc should be encased in { and }.
• Archiphonemes should be declared in the Multichar_Symbols section in the header of the file after the grammatical tags, with a comment giving their possible forms.
• If the archiphoneme is subject to deletion, it should be written in lower case, e.g. {s}
• If the archiphoneme has a range of default surface forms (even if rarely subject to deletion), it should be written in upper case, e.g. {A}
• If the archiphoneme is always deleted, it may consist of more than one character, e.g. {dup}. This is, however, advised against.

Frequently asked questions

Why use {C} and not ^C ?

<spectie> was thinking about {A} over ^A
<Flammie> good
<spectie> and worked out a nice argument for it (aside from pure aesthetics): other programs (e.g. morphological segmenters) parsing the output with {A} don't need to know about multicharacter symbols 
<spectie> compare: 
<spectie> foo{A}z{A}l
<spectie> foo^Az^Al
<spectie> with the first you know where the symbol ends
<spectie> in the second you do not know
<spectie> it may be ^Az and ^Al or ^A z ^A l