Latin alpha
The Latin alpha (Ɑ / ɑ) is a letter in the Latin writing system . In Unicode it is included as:
- Small letter : U + 0251 latin small letter alpha in the block IPA extensions
- Capital letter: U + 2C6D latin capital letter alpha in the Latin block extended-C
The international phonetic alphabet (IPA) distinguishes between:
- the Latin "a" in its open ("two-story") form for the unrounded open front tongue vowel ,
- the closed (“one-story”) ɑ (originally a Greek alpha ) for the unrounded open back vowel .
The Latin alpha is also used in the American Phonetic Alphabet for the low back spread vowel . The capital letter form is also used here, namely for the corresponding voiceless vowel .
The letters that are differentiated as in the IPA were also included as different letters in 1978 in the African Reference Alphabet and from this later in the General Alphabet of the Cameroonian languages . As a result, the character originally included in the IPA as a Greek alpha became a Latin alpha letter in the Latin writing system. In this context, the capital letter form was also introduced as an enlarged form of the lower case letter in a commonly used orthography of a language. With the same meaning as in IPA, the letter u. a. used to write the languages Fe'fe ' and Tigon-Mbembe .
Typography and appearance
The Latin alpha in its straight (non-cursive) form consists of a left-facing belly and a vertical trunk on the right (often with a spout on the bottom right), each at full letter height. Thus, in many fonts it is similar to the straight italic form of the lowercase "a". In contrast to the Greek alpha, its shape does not show a loop shape.
One problem of the representation of this point that many fonts in italic font style for the "a" a closed ( "one-story") to use the form, and poorly at all or that the Latin Alpha to lowercase so in italic form of "a" can distinguish. This can be remedied by additional open ("two-story") glyphs for italic "a" in the font, which are automatically selected via "Smart Font" technologies such as OpenType or Graphite if the text belongs to an IPA text or an African language is excellent.
Individual references and sources
- ↑ a b Lorna A. Priest, Peter G. Constable: Proposal to Encode Additional Latin Phonetic and Orthographic Characters. (PDF; 1.4 MB) ISO / IEC JTC1 / SC2 / WG2, Document N2945, August 9, 2005, accessed on April 29, 2013 (English).