It is not horrible, but have you tried just lowering the regular parentheses? I think that would be less jarring for those 1 ‰ of us who will ever notice. Reminds me of a really old thread were I was dissatisfied with a lining percentage mark next to old style numerals.

Further to Frode’s comment, if this is a big issue, look for a typeface with parentheses the center vertically on the x-height (e.g. anything from Shinntype :-)

Also, for my taste the parentheses in your sample are too straight.

Substituting parentheses from a different font is another option.

I would use normal parentheses, not the small caps, which to a graphic designer could look better, but I have the feeling that, when read at a small text size, they will risk to disappear to a reader's eye. But check out the kerning: in the German text example, it seems to me that you need to increase the kerning a little in some cases: in ...e(n) and ...r(in), for example, the e and r and nearly touching the parenthesis, and its seems that some more space is needed there.

The narrow sidebearing on the outside of parentheses caters to situations such as the beginning of a line, or parenthesization of whole words/phrases/sentences, but “fails” in Nina’s usage here.

I am tempted to consider implementing contextual substitution of alternate parentheses for letter-parenleft and parenright-letter combinations, with wider sidebearings on the “outside”.

**

Why parentheses?
A discrete periodcentered would work better — breaking up the word rather like syllabicization in dictionaries.
I think readers would “get” that immediately.

and yet the adjacent thread to this concerns the "s/he" ligature...

Yes, of course, one must go with the client’s editorial decision.
I was just musing on the subject.

I may get bashed for this, but I always felt that this is about political correctness vs. langual properness.
“Political correctness” is a demagogic tool of a minority to impose rather questionable concepts onto the general public, and to discriminate those who don’t wish to follow.

No one ever speaks like »die StudentInnen« etcª. “The doctor” means, if not specified otherwise, *a medical person (male or female)*, not “The male doctor”.
In my point of view this implemeting into type composing is just as nonsensical and nasty as it is in speach.
It is unnatural, and will ever be.

> Women are a minority?

very funny.

99 of 100 women don’t care about those things.

Regardless of all the social concerns, I think this is an excellent idea. In linguistics one often encounters things that are either optional or contextually dependent, surrounded with parentheses. Since parens are mostly cap-height or ascender height, the effect is jarring. See this list of suffixes, for example: ‑ch, ‑k(w), ‑x(w), ‑(ʼ)n, ‑ts.

There are pairs of Unicode parens for superscript and subscript elements which are very useful for phonetic transcriptions that use a lot of superscript and – to a lesser extent – subscript modifiers. These are far more readable than their full-sized parenthesis counterparts: ‑k⁽ʷ⁾, ‑tɬ⁽ʹ⁾, tʃ⁽ʰ⁾‑, ‑l⁽ˤ⁾, ‑t₍.₎s‑, ‑ŋ₍₊₎ versus ‑k(ʷ), ‑tɬ(ʼ), tʃ(ʰ)‑, ‑l(ˤ), ‑t(.)s‑, ‑ŋ(₊). (Pretend that those examples are all in an appropriate typeface rather than mangled by your browser.) Having a similar pair of parentheses for x-height elements would be a major typographic improvement, though I imagine it would take some time to catch on given that the superscript and subscript ones are only beginning to see regular use.

The parens become too spindly

That's what Demi is for. :-)

hhp