Re: IPA symbols 677 (faucalized) and 678 (labialized: open-rounded)

From: Kenneth Whistler (kenw@sybase.com)
Date: Thu Jan 07 2010 - 17:56:19 CST

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    Karl Pentzlin asked:

    > I fail to identify the IPA symbols 677 (faucalized) and 678
    > (labialized: open-rounded) in ine Unicode tables (see attached scan
    > from p.190 of the "Handbook of the International Phonetic
    > Association", Cambridge 1999 (reprint 2003), ISBN 0 521 63751 1).

    Note that those are not IPA symbols per se, but are part
    of Extended IPA, and more specifically a collection of symbols
    defined by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics
    Association (ICPLA).

    > I expected them to be
    > MODIFIER LETTER CAPITAL H WITH STROKE
    > MODIFIER LETTER SMALL LIGATURE OE
    > but I did neither find them by these or related names, nor
    > by looking at the glyphs in Latin, Phonetic and similar-named blocks.
    > Did I overlook them, or are they in fact unencoded?

    They are not encoded in Unicode as characters per se.

    Note, however, that they can be represented simply by using
    superscript forms of:

    U+0126 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER H WITH STROKE
    U+0153 LATIN SMALL LIGATURE OE

    And that is in fact exactly how they are already represented, for
    example, on the Extended IPA Wiki page:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensions_to_the_IPA

    Because Extended IPA involves a number of conventions that
    are not necessarily amenable to plain text representation,
    including ballooning of unvocalized text, parenthesized
    diacritics, and subscripted italic expressions adopted
    from musical notation, it isn't entirely obvious that
    all symbols from Extended IPA (including these two) are
    self-evident candidates for separate encoding as characters.
    The case would need to be made -- and it would help if
    the IPA and/or the ICPLA came knocking with a case to
    be made regarding data representation, for which rich
    text representations (i.e., using the superscripts of
    existing characters) would not suffice.

    --Ken



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