Hm... the fact that the standard calls it the Latin letter upsilon may be significant... although I'm not sure how, since epsilon is a Greek letter, so I'm not sure how it could have a Latin version... oh well. Indeed, though, the Unicode chart does explicitly distinguish between a "Latin letter upsilon" and a "Greek letter upsilon". Hm. Maybe the ancient Romans sometimes used their own modified version of the Greek alphabet instead of the now more familiar Roman alphabet?
Ah, no, here we go: this page explains the matter. Apparently the IPA decided to "Latinize" some of the curvier Greek letters by giving them more regular shapes and adding serifs. As the linked page puts it, "The upsilon is so changed in fact as to be unrecognisable: the glyph is more commonly termed a 'bucket'."
So there we have it... the "Latin letter upsilon" isn't a "real" upsilon; it's a variant upsilon created by the IPA to more resemble a Roman letter.
As for the Latin letter OU not being found in any of the fonts on my computer... you know, I actually had an Algonquin font (which presumably included that letter) installed on my old computer, but after getting a new computer I never got around to installing it on this one. For that matter, I haven't installed IPA fonts on my new computer either, which I really need to do, since I actually have quite a few documents in which I've used those. (Currently, where I used the IPA fonts, Word rather inexplicably substitutes the "WP MultinationalB Courier" font, which consists of only twenty characters that don't correlate in any way with those of the IPA font in the same positions and, needless to say, doesn't really work.) I've been meaning to install on my new computer all the fonts I'd had on my old one, but haven't yet gotten around to it...
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2004-08-20 09:03 am (UTC)Ah, no, here we go: this page explains the matter. Apparently the IPA decided to "Latinize" some of the curvier Greek letters by giving them more regular shapes and adding serifs. As the linked page puts it, "The upsilon is so changed in fact as to be unrecognisable: the glyph is more commonly termed a 'bucket'."
So there we have it... the "Latin letter upsilon" isn't a "real" upsilon; it's a variant upsilon created by the IPA to more resemble a Roman letter.
As for the Latin letter OU not being found in any of the fonts on my computer... you know, I actually had an Algonquin font (which presumably included that letter) installed on my old computer, but after getting a new computer I never got around to installing it on this one. For that matter, I haven't installed IPA fonts on my new computer either, which I really need to do, since I actually have quite a few documents in which I've used those. (Currently, where I used the IPA fonts, Word rather inexplicably substitutes the "WP MultinationalB Courier" font, which consists of only twenty characters that don't correlate in any way with those of the IPA font in the same positions and, needless to say, doesn't really work.) I've been meaning to install on my new computer all the fonts I'd had on my old one, but haven't yet gotten around to it...