Hallo!
I think I have spotted a possible problem with the Unicode encoding of the
International Phonetic Alphabet.
The IPA has two <open, not rounded> vowels (see them in this picture
http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/vowels.html - they are the two lowermost
letters on the left of the dots).
One of these (<back, open, not rounded>, the one looking like an alpha or an
italic a), is properly encoded as:
U+0251 LATIN SMALL LETTER ALPHA (formerly LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT
A)
The other one (<front, open, not rounded>, the one resembling a normal a in
Times Roman), is not encoded as a separate character because, apparently, it
has been unified with the ordinary Latin a:
U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A
The problem with this unification is that the only graphic difference
between the <back> and <front> vowel signs is the presence or the absence of
the "nose" (or "hook") on the top of the letter.
In IPA it is normative that <front, open, not rounded> has a "nose" and that
<back, open, not rounded> has no "nose", while in the ordinary Latin
alphabet, having a "nose" or not is only a matter of taste. There are many
fonts that have a "noseless a" (e.g. Futura, Modern, most script-like fonts,
most italic fonts).
Even if the designers of a "noseless a" font povide a special "nose a"
glyph, they would have no Unicode codepoint to which they can attach it:
they cannot use U+0061 because that would mean giving up their "noseless a"
decision (that is probably much more important to font vendors than
supporting IPA altogether).
For this reason, I think that there should be a separate character in the
IPA block to represent a <front, open, not rounded> vowel; something like:
U+02xx LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH NOSE
This addition, however, would create a new problem similar to the one
recently discussed on this list for the characters:
U+0037 DIGIT SEVEN
U+0294 LATIN LETTER GLOTTAL STOP
Now, a new pair of characters very similar and very likely to be confused
would arise:
U+0061 LATIN SMALL LETTER A
U+02xx LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH NOSE
But probably, all this had already been noticed and discussed before. And
maybe even fixed.
Regards.
Marco Cimarosti, Italy
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