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Obsolete and nonstandard IPA symbols

There are a variety of obsolete and nonstandard symbols (letters and diacritics) that have been used in and alongside the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). These fall into a few basic categories, including:

  • Those used historically in the IPA
  • Some represent standard phonetic values that have been modified or replaced completely, such as for modern
  • Others represent varied manners and places of articulation, or represent sounds paired with secondary articulation, that have been dropped altogether with the idea that they should instead be indicated with diacritics, such as for modern
  • Those specific to local linguistic traditions that otherwise use standard IPA
  • Some represent sounds in a more simplified form, such as the Americanist for standard
  • Others represent phonemes and phones that may be generally difficult to describe with the usage of standard letters and diacritics, such as the Sinologist for so-called "apical vowels"
  • Those which fill in "gaps" of the IPA chart
  • Some are "implicit" or "expected" symbols created or used by iconographic analogy to symbols for related sounds, such as for
  • Others are simply created or used for common sounds that lack independent symbols, such as for
  • Those applying to any of the above categories that have been proposed for usage in or adjacent to the IPA
  • Some have been formally proposed to and rejected by the International Phonetic Association, many of which have been largely or entirely unused outside of their respective proposals
  • Others have been informally proposed and occasionally used but have lacked widespread consensus in their usage, often being idiosyncratic or seeing a number of competing proposals to represent a sound

These may all be referred to as para-IPA, a term describing "symbols that are commonly used within IPA notation but that are not themselves part of the IPA alphabet."

Notes and related

While the IPA does not itself have a set of capital letters (the ones that look like capitals are actually small capitals), many languages have adopted symbols from the IPA as part of their orthographies, and in such cases they have invented capital variants of these. This is especially common in Africa. An example is Kabiyé of northern Togo, which has . Other pseudo-IPA capitals supported by Unicode are (see case variants of IPA letters).

Capital letters are also used as cover symbols in phonotactic descriptions: = consonant, = vowel, = nasal, = sonorant or sibilant, etc. When these symbols are used for indeterminate sounds, extIPA recommends the use of a surrounding circle . The asterisk is the convention the IPA uses when it has no symbol for a phone or feature, but which is typically determinate (for example the creaky-voiced glottal approximant reported by Ladefoged & Maddieson); extIPA explicitly defines the symbol for this purpose. Both cases (indeterminate sounds and determinate but lacking a formal symbol) may be referred to as wildcard symbols. The table below includes a handful of other nonstandard wildcards.

In addition to the categories mentioned above, this table also contains symbols that are sometimes seen as typographical substitutes or are otherwise mistaken for proper IPA symbols due to similarity of shape. Typographical substitutions were commonly seen in the typewriter era, prior to the computer encoding of characters and introduction of Unicode. There are also some symbols from local linguistic traditions which are used as equivalents rather than simplifications (as are commonly seen for affricates).

The table does not include commonplace extensions or conventions of the IPA, such as doubling a symbol for a greater degree of a feature ( extra-long , extra stress, strongly aspirated , and extra-rhotic ), nor superscripting for a lesser degree of a feature ( slightly prenasalized , slightly affricated , and epenthetic schwa).

Table

References

See also