The Most Common IPA Characters

From: Markus Kuhn (Markus.Kuhn@cl.cam.ac.uk)
Date: Mon Aug 31 1998 - 06:46:59 EDT


Can you help me to complete the following list?

# Very small selection of IPA characters for common dictionary and
# school book usage. We cover only the languages most commonly taught
# in Europe as foreign European languages (English, French, Spanish,
# German, Italian, Russian, etc.), and also only the non-combining
# characters.

014B # LATIN SMALL LETTER ENG
0251 # LATIN SMALL LETTER ALPHA
0252 # LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED ALPHA
0254 # LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN O
0259 # LATIN SMALL LETTER SCHWA
025B # LATIN SMALL LETTER OPEN E
025C # LATIN SMALL LETTER REVERSED OPEN E
0265 # LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED H
026A # LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL I
0272 # LATIN SMALL LETTER N WITH LEFT HOOK
0275 # LATIN SMALL LETTER BARRED O
0280 # LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL R
0283 # LATIN SMALL LETTER ESH
028A # LATIN SMALL LETTER UPSILON
028C # LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED V
028E # LATIN SMALL LETTER TURNED Y
028F # LATIN LETTER SMALL CAPITAL Y
0292 # LATIN SMALL LETTER EZH
02B3 # MODIFIER LETTER SMALL R
02C8 # MODIFIER LETTER VERTICAL LINE
02CC # MODIFIER LETTER LOW VERTICAL LINE
02D0 # MODIFIER LETTER TRIANGULAR COLON

# Plane 00
# Rows Positions (Cells)

  01 4B
  02 51-52 54 59 5B-5C 65 6A 72 75 80 83 8A 8C 8E-8F 92 B3 C8 CC D0

# Number of characters in above table: 22

I am playing with the idea of adding a small collection of IPA
characters for the most commonly taught languages to SECS/MES-2
<http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/secs.html>, but first I have to
find out, which characters these are. The above 22 characters cover the
dictionaries that I found this morning quite well. Could you please
check your dictionaries as well? Please look only into dictionaries for
major European languages that are commonly taught at schools as foreign
languages, not into linguistic textbooks or other specialist literature.
We all know that support of full specialist usage IPA
<http://www.arts.gla.ac.uk/IPA/fullchart.html> requires combining
characters and this is clearly left to MES-4 and not to this small
collection.

I showed MES-2 to a number of people over the past few days (students
from various fields at my college). It was generally perceived to be
very useful as an ISO 8859-1 replacement (especially the presence of
the MATH symbols was welcomed a lot) and the only critique that I
encountered was the lack of the more commonly used IPA characters. Many
people are familar with some IPA subset from their school education and
they would find those characters useful to have available for instance
in email discussions about the pronounciations of certain words or on
Web pages for a phonetic representation of their name.

A glyph table with the above 22 characters follows below.

Thanks for any advice in this ...

Markus

--
Markus G. Kuhn, Security Group, Computer Lab, Cambridge University, UK
email: mkuhn at acm.org,  home page: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>




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