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.
The tilde, ˜ or ~, is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish and Portuguese, which in turn came from the Latin titulus, meaning "title" or "superscription". Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in combination with a base letter but, for historical reasons, it also is used in standalone form in a variety of contexts.
The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at University College London. It is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and extend SAMPA to cover the entire range of characters in the 1993 version of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The result is a SAMPA-inspired remapping of the IPA into 7-bit ASCII.
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.
Windows-1258 is a code page used in Microsoft Windows to represent Vietnamese texts. It makes use of combining diacritical marks.
A ring diacritic may appear above or below letters. It may be combined with some letters of the extended Latin alphabets in various contexts.
The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration (IAST) is a transliteration scheme that allows the lossless romanisation of Indic scripts as employed by Sanskrit and related Indic languages. It is based on a scheme that emerged during the nineteenth century from suggestions by Charles Trevelyan, William Jones, Monier Monier-Williams and other scholars, and formalised by the Transliteration Committee of the Geneva Oriental Congress, in September 1894. IAST makes it possible for the reader to read the Indic text unambiguously, exactly as if it were in the original Indic script. It is this faithfulness to the original scripts that accounts for its continuing popularity amongst scholars.
Several binary representations of 8-bit character sets for common Western European languages are compared in this article. These encodings were designed for representation of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, English, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic, which use the Latin alphabet, a few additional letters and ones with precomposed diacritics, some punctuation, and various symbols. Although they're called "Western European" many of these languages are spoken all over the world. Also, these character sets happen to support many other languages such as Malay, Swahili, and Classical Latin.
Unicode has a certain amount of duplication of characters. These are pairs of single Unicode code points that are canonically equivalent. The reason for this are compatibility issues with legacy systems.
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.
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) requires specific names for the symbols and diacritics used in the alphabet.
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.
The Unicode Consortium (UC) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) collaborate on the Universal Character Set (UCS). The UCS is an international standard to map characters used in natural language, mathematics, music, and other domains to machine-readable values. By creating this mapping, the UCS enables computer software vendors to interoperate and transmit UCS-encoded text strings from one to another. Because it is a universal map, it can be used to represent multiple languages at the same time. This avoids the confusion of using multiple legacy character encodings, which can result in the same sequence of codes having multiple meanings and thus be improperly decoded if the wrong one is chosen.
In Unicode, a script is a collection of letters and other written signs used to represent textual information in one or more writing systems. Some scripts support one and only one writing system and language, for example, Armenian. Other scripts support many different writing systems; for example, the Latin script supports English, French, German, Italian, Vietnamese, Latin itself, and several other languages. Some languages make use of multiple alternate writing systems and thus also use several scripts; for example, in Turkish, the Arabic script was used before the 20th century but transitioned to Latin in the early part of the 20th century. For a list of languages supported by each script, see the list of languages by writing system. More or less complementary to scripts are symbols and Unicode control characters.
Many scripts in Unicode, including Arabic and Devanāgarī, have special orthographic rules that require certain combinations of letterforms to be combined into special ligature forms.
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.
The programming language APL uses a number of symbols, rather than words from natural language, to identify operations, similarly to mathematical symbols. Prior to the wide adoption of Unicode, a number of special-purpose EBCDIC and non-EBCDIC code pages were used to represent the symbols required for writing APL.
The Unicode Standard assigns various properties to each Unicode character and code point.
The VT100 code page is a character encoding used to represent text on the Classic Mac OS for compatibility with the VT100 terminal. It encodes 256 characters, the first 128 of which are identical to ASCII, with the remaining characters including mathematical symbols, diacritics, and additional punctuation marks. It is suitable for English and several other Western languages. It is similar to Mac OS Roman, but includes all characters in ISO 8859-1 except for the currency sign, the no-break space, and the soft hyphen. It also includes all characters in DEC Special Graphics, except for the new line and no-break space controls. The VT100 encoding is only used on the VT100 font on the Classic Mac OS, and is not an official Mac OS character encoding.
