ISO/IEC JTC 1/SC 2/WG 2
Proposal to encode CROSS ACCENT in ISO/IEC 10646

A. Administrative

1. Title:	Proposal to encode CROSS ACCENT in ISO/IEC 10646
2. Requester's name:	Mattias Ellert
3. Requester type:	Individual contribution
4. Submission date:	1998-05-21
5. Requester's reference:	N/A
6. Completion:	This is a complete proposal

B. Technical - General

1a. New character name:	CROSS ACCENT
1b. Addition to existing block:	SPACING MODIFIER LETTERS
2. Number of characters in proposal:	1
3. Proposed category:	A
4. Proposed Level of Implementation:	Level 1. It's a non-combining character
5a. Character names provided?	Yes
5b. Character names names in accordance guidelines?	Yes
5c. Character shapes reviewable?	Yes
6a. Who will provide computerized font?	John Fiscella at Production First Software has expressed interest in providing the necessary font
6b. Font currently available?	N/A
6c. Font format:	N/A
7a. Are references (to other character sets, dictionaries, descriptive texts, etc.) provided?	Yes. See below
7b. Are published examples (such as samples from newspapers, magazines, or other sources) of use of proposed characters attached?	Yes. See below
8. Does the proposal address other aspects of character data processing?	No

C. Technical - Justification

1. Has this proposal for addition of character(s) been submitted before?	No
2. Contact with the user community?	No
3. Information on the user community:	Students and professors of the Swedish language
4a. The context of use for the proposed characters:	To mark the grave accent (a.k.a. accent II) in Swedish in the IPA.
4b. Reference:	See below
5a. Proposed characters in current use?	Yes
5b. Where?	In pronounciation guides and other texts on phonetics regarding the Swedish language
6a. Proposed characters should be encoded entirely in the BMP?	Yes. Position U+02DF is proposed for the encoding
6b. Rationale:	Addition to a block already in the BMP
7. Should the proposed characters be kept together in a contiguous range?	N/A
8a. Can any of the proposed characters be considered a presentation form of an existing character or character sequence?	No, unless you would consider it a superscript version of U+00D7 (MULTIPLICATION SIGN)
8b. Rationale for its inclusion?	This is a spacing accent mark, and has nothing to do with multiplication
9a. Can any of the proposed character(s) be considered to be similar (in appearance or function) to an existing character?	Yes, it is similar to, but clearly different from, U+02E3 (MODIFIER LETTER SMALL X) and U+033D (COMBINING X ABOVE)
9b. rationale for its inclusion?	None of the characters above are the same as the proposed one, and they have different meanings in th IPA
10a. Does the proposal include use of combining characters and/or use of composite sequences?	No
10b. Is a list of composite sequences and their corresponding glyph images provided?	No
11. Does the proposal contain characters with any special properties such as control function or similar semantics?	No

D. SC 2/WG 2 Administrative (To be completed by SC 2/WG 2)

Relevant SC 2/WG 2 document numbers:
Status (list of meeting number and corresponding action or disposition):
Additional contact to user communities, liaison organizations etc:
Assigned category and assigned priority/time frame:

E. Proposal

This document is a proposal to encode CROSS ACCENT in the SPACING MODIFIER LETTERS block of ISO/IEC 10646. This letter is used in IPA to mark the grave accent (a.k.a. accent II) in Swedish.

In Swedish there are two different ways to put the stress on a syllable in a word. These are known as acute accent (or accent I) and grave accent (or accent II). There exists pairs of words where the only difference between the words is the type of stress. In pronounciation guides the acute accent is indicated with the normal IPA stress mark U+02C8 (MODIFIER LETTER VERTICAL LINE) while the grave accent is indicated with an other character which at present is missing from ISO/IEC 10646. This is a proposal to include this character in the standard.

This table shows a few pairs of Swedish words, in which the only difference between the words is the kind of stress that is put on the first syllable of the word.

Acute accent Grave accent

'anden (the duck) ^×anden (the spirit)

'buren (the cage) ^×buren (carried)

'stegen (the steps) ^×stegen (the ladder)

'biten (the piece) ^×biten (bitten)

'udden (the point (on a pencil)) ^×udden (the point = the cape)

Acute accent	Grave accent
'anden (the duck)	^×anden (the spirit)
'buren (the cage)	^×buren (carried)
'stegen (the steps)	^×stegen (the ladder)
'biten (the piece)	^×biten (bitten)
'udden (the point (on a pencil))	^×udden (the point = the cape)