Title: IPA-Related Defect Reports
Source: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
Primary Author: John Cowan (no affiliation)
Status: Expert contribution
Action: For the consideration of UTC
References: The Unicode Standard 2.0, IPA chart
Distribution: UTC and elsewhere as appropriate
(UTC Secretary: Please acknowledge receipt. Thank you.)
Summary: I decided to consult the current official IPA chart at
http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/fullchart.html and compare
it with Unicode 2.0, which led to five defect reports,
involving three new proposed characters.
1. The glyph for U+0284 LATIN SMALL LETTER DOTLESS J WITH STROKE
AND HOOK on pp. 7-30 and 732 seems to have one stroke too many:
the IPA chart shows only the lower stroke, and the character name
also suggests that only one stroke should be present.
2. The diacritics (as opposed to letters) for "high rising"
and "low rising" tone are side-by-side kerned versions of
COMBINING MACRON plus COMBINING ACUTE and COMBINING GRAVE
plus COMBINING MACRON respectively. This result can be
achieved by using the "Vietnamese" diacritics U+0340 and U+0341.
I suggest that the explanations of these characters on p. 7-43
be expanded from "kerns left/right of circumflex" to "kerns left/right
of circumflex or macron", and that the "strongly discouraged"
language on p. 6-15 be removed or modified. It is not clear to me
that the stacked alternative (macron above acute, etc.) means
anything different in IPA, but it isn't clear that it doesn't,
either.
3. The IPA diacritic for "laminal" doesn't seem to have a
Unicode equivalent. It looks like a stretched version of
U+033B, but is probably a merger of U+032A above U+033A so
that the glyphs touch. Proposed name: COMBINING RECTANGLE BELOW.
4. The IPA diacritic for "no audible release" also has no
visible Unicode equivalent. It is a spacing modifier letter,
and looks like a superscript HEBREW LETTER RESH or a superscript
BOX DRAWINGS LIGHT DOWN AND RIGHT. However, it lacks the
right-to-left property of the former, and the symbolic property
of the latter; it is a letter. No proposed name as yet.
5. The letter U+026B LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH MIDDLE TILDE
is not properly a unitary IPA letter. It is really the
ordinary LATIN SMALL LETTER L with a COMBINING MIDDLE TILDE
diacritic meaning "velarized/pharyngealized". This diacritic
can be applied to other consonants, and should be introduced
as a new Unicode combining diacritic. (I conjecture that the
confusion arose because L WITH MIDDLE TILDE is shown in the
chart as an example of MIDDLE TILDE usage.) If this is done,
U+026B can become a compatibility equivalent. Note that
O WITH MIDDLE TILDE has to be considered an anomalous name,
because the "middle" part is straight, not swung.
-- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan cowan@ccil.org e'osai ko sarji la lojban
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