IPA Symbol Names
The symbols and diacritics used by the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) require distinct names so they can be used in the linguistic alphabet. Because there is no one-to-one match between sounds and symbols, making them differentiated from each other is essential. The characters’ descriptions and names are illustrated in the Handbook of the International Phonetic Association.
Ligatures: Unicode sometimes calls ligatures “digraphs” in error, and a few have designated names such as ethel and ash.
Letters: Traditional names of Greek and Latin letters are used for fundamental symbols.
Unicode: Unicode is a unique number for a character or symbol for creating computer formats of the IPA. Some are original Greek symbols with Latin forms, and others use Greek symbols.
Small Caps: Some small capital letters are included in the IPA standard. However, it’s common to call them “caps” or “capitals” because capital letters are not used in IPA standards.
Cursive-Based Letters: Some letters have the forms of cursive or script letters.
Rotated Letters: Some letters are rotated 180 degrees and used as descriptions for open-back, open-mid-back, labial-palatal, and palatal labial. In addition, some letters are flipped vertically or reversed.
Letters with Curls, Serifs, and Extra Lines: A crossbar is a horizontal stroke, and other letters may have:
- A double-barred pipe
- Hook top
- A slash through it
- The Tail looped over itself is a curly
- A right or left tail
There are also occasional unique modifications such as a belted l, closed reversed epsilon, right-leg turned m, turned long-leg r, double pipe, and the obsolete stretched c. Some non-English letters have conventional names such as c cedilla, schwa (also spelled shwa), eth (also spelled edh), engma or eng, an exclamation mark, and pipe.
Quirky Symbol Names Only for the IPA
Some IPA symbols have developed their own peculiar names, such as ram’s horns, bull’s eye, fish-hook r, esh, ezh or yogh, and hook-top heng. Other symbols are called by the sounds they represent and are rarely used to define anything else, like the glottal stop, sometimes called a gelded question mark.
How the IPA Acquired Names for Symbols
There are two methods for naming diacritics, non-traditional and traditional. Non-traditional diacritics are named after objects they resemble, such as “d-bridge.” The IPA notes that traditional diacritics names are based on a well-known language such as French and English.
The names of Greek and Latin letters are commonly used for unmodified IPA letters. Letters not directly taken from these Latin and Greek alphabets can have various names, and some names are created from the sound or appearance of the symbol.
IPA Symbol Names and Unicode
Unicode was developed in the 1980s as a contemporary standard for representing text found in print and digital form. It is a standard of information technology that provides consistent encoding of text expressed in writing systems worldwide. The symbols also have nonce names in the Unicode standard, a basic abstract definition unit. In some cases, the Unicode and the IPA do not agree. Unicode calls one symbol “small letter open E,” and the IPA calls it “epsilon.”
Including phonetic symbols in general computer applications such as word processing, email, presentation graphics, and web pages has been almost entirely solved by implementing the Unicode standard.