Latin IPA letter a

In Times New Roman, which is the default font for MS Word (probably the
best known word processor), the letters “a” and “ɑ” are
indistinguishable in italics. The IPA is not meant to be used in
italics, however a phonemic transcription is enclosed by solidi and some
software consider words between asterisks should be renderd in bold,
words between low lines should be underlined and words between solidi
should be… italicised.
Therefore, phonemic transcriptions in an e-mail are sometimes italicized
and /a/ and /ɑ/, which represent different sounds, cannot be
distinguished.

In the Cyrillic alphabet, many letters have a similar form in capital
and in lower-case. That’s also the case for the letter el (Л л).
However, a small capital el has been encoded (ᴫ, U+1D2B) and the only
difference with the small el is that “in italic style, the glyph is
obliqued, not italicized”. (UPA is usually used in italics.)

Would it be possible to introduce a Latin small IPA letter a which, in
italic style, would be obliqued, not italicized?
Received on Tue Jun 28 2011 - 03:30:46 CDT