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The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standardized representation of speech sounds in written form. The IPA is used by lexicographers, foreign language students and teachers, linguists, speech–language pathologists, singers, actors, constructed language creators, and translators.
In digital typography, combining characters are characters that are intended to modify other characters. The most common combining characters in the Latin script are the combining diacritical marks.
The character ⟨ʔ⟩, called glottal stop, is an alphabetic letter in some Latin alphabets, most notably in several languages of Canada where it indicates a glottal stop sound. Such usage derives from phonetic transcription, for example the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), that use this letter for the glottal stop sound. The letter derives graphically from use of the apostrophe ⟨ʼ⟩ or the symbol ʾ for glottal stop.
Unicode has subscripted and superscripted versions of a number of characters including a full set of Arabic numerals. These characters allow any polynomial, chemical and certain other equations to be represented in plain text without using any form of markup like HTML or TeX.
Over a thousand characters from the Latin script are encoded in the Unicode Standard, grouped in several basic and extended Latin blocks. The extended ranges contain mainly precomposed letters plus diacritics that are equivalently encoded with combining diacritics, as well as some ligatures and distinct letters, used for example in the orthographies of various African languages and the Vietnamese alphabet. Latin Extended-C contains additions for Uighur and the Claudian letters. Latin Extended-D comprises characters that are mostly of interest to medievalists. Latin Extended-E mostly comprises characters used for German dialectology (Teuthonista). Latin Extended-F and -G contain characters for phonetic transcription.
Unicode supports several phonetic scripts and notations through the existing writing systems and the addition of extra blocks with phonetic characters. These phonetic extras are derived from an existing script, usually Latin, Greek or Cyrillic. Apart from International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), extensions to the IPA and obsolete and nonstandard IPA symbols, these blocks also contain characters from the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet and the Americanist Phonetic Alphabet.
Spacing Modifier Letters is a Unicode block containing characters for the IPA, UPA, and other phonetic transcriptions. Included are the IPA tone marks, and modifiers for aspiration and palatalization. The word spacing indicates that these characters occupy their own horizontal space within a line of text. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was simply Modifier Letters.
Bopomofo, or Mandarin Phonetic Symbols, also named Zhuyin, is a Chinese transliteration system for Mandarin Chinese and other related languages and dialects. More commonly used in Taiwanese Mandarin, it may also be used to transcribe other varieties of Chinese, particularly other varieties of Mandarin Chinese dialects, as well as Taiwanese Hokkien. Consisting of 37 characters and five tone marks, it transcribes all possible sounds in Mandarin.
Tone letters are letters that represent the tones of a language, most commonly in languages with contour tones.
Latin Extended-B is the fourth block (0180-024F) of the Unicode Standard. It has been included since version 1.0, where it was only allocated to the code points 0180-01FF and contained 113 characters. During unification with ISO 10646 for version 1.1, the block range was extended by 80 code points and another 35 characters were assigned. In version 3.0 and later, the last 60 available code points in the block were assigned. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Extended Latin.
IPA Extensions is a block (0250–02AF) of the Unicode standard that contains full size letters used in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Both modern and historical characters are included, as well as former and proposed IPA signs and non-IPA phonetic letters. Additional characters employed for phonetics, like the palatalization sign, are encoded in the blocks Phonetic Extensions (1D00–1D7F) and Phonetic Extensions Supplement (1D80–1DBF). Diacritics are found in the Spacing Modifier Letters (02B0–02FF) and Combining Diacritical Marks (0300–036F) blocks. Its block name in Unicode 1.0 was Standard Phonetic.
Miscellaneous Symbols and Pictographs is a Unicode block containing meteorological and astronomical symbols, emoji characters largely for compatibility with Japanese telephone carriers' implementations of Shift JIS, and characters originally from the Wingdings and Webdings fonts found in Microsoft Windows.
Greek and Coptic is the Unicode block for representing modern (monotonic) Greek. It was originally used for writing Coptic, using the similar Greek letters, in addition to the uniquely Coptic additions. Beginning with version 4.1 of the Unicode Standard, a separate Coptic block has been included in Unicode, allowing for mixed Greek/Coptic text that is stylistically contrastive, as is convention in scholarly works. Writing polytonic Greek requires the use of combining characters or the precomposed vowel + tone characters in the Greek Extended character block.
Superscripts and Subscripts is a Unicode block containing superscript and subscript numerals, mathematical operators, and letters used in mathematics and phonetics. The use of subscripts and superscripts in Unicode allows any polynomial, chemical and certain other equations to be represented in plain text without using any form of markup like HTML or TeX. Other superscript letters can be found in the Spacing Modifier Letters, Phonetic Extensions and Phonetic Extensions Supplement blocks, while the superscript 1, 2, and 3, inherited from ISO 8859-1, were included in the Latin-1 Supplement block.
Bopomofo is a Unicode block containing phonetic characters for Chinese. The original set of 40 Bopomofo characters is based on the Chinese standard GB 2312. Additional Bopomofo characters can be found in the Bopomofo Extended block.
Bopomofo Extended is a Unicode block containing additional Bopomofo characters for writing phonetic Min Nan, Hakka Chinese, Cantonese, Hmu, and Ge. The basic set of Bopomofo characters can be found in the Bopomofo block.
Emoticons is a Unicode block containing emoticons or emoji. Most of them are intended as representations of faces, although some of them include hand gestures or non-human characters.
Latin Extended-F is a Unicode block containing modifier letters, nearly all IPA and extIPA, for phonetic transcription. The Latin Extended-F and -G blocks contain the first Latin characters defined outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
Cyrillic Extended-D is a Unicode block containing superscript and subscript Cyrillic characters used in Cyrillic-based phonetic transcription. The block contains the first Cyrillic characters defined outside of the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP).
References
- ↑ "Unicode character database". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2016-07-09.
- ↑ "Enumerated Versions of The Unicode Standard". The Unicode Standard. Retrieved 2016-07-09.