African reference alphabet

The African Reference Alphabet is the 1982 revised version of 1978, held in one of the UNESCO in Niamey (Niger ) conference developed Alphabet proposal. The conference recommended that for each sound (in fact, for each phoneme ) a single letter instead of multi-letter combinations ( digraphs or trigraphs ) or letters with diacritical marks to be used.

The African Reference Alphabet is clearly related to the Africa - alphabet and reflects the practical experience with the latter resist. The Niamey conference also built on the work of an earlier UNESCO - organized conference in 1966 in Bamako ( Mali) had the harmonization of the transcription of African languages ​​on the topic.

Previous versions 1978

From the Niamey Conference 1978 different result reports in English and French, were created. Specifically, the images of the different alphabets and there are also substantive differences exist.

In the English version of an alphabet with 57 letters, it is proposed in a respective upper and lower case form. Eight of these letters were formed from letters of the Latin alphabet 26 -character basis and under a set underscore ( _). Many of the glyphs, mostly uppercase forms, appear unusual and can not be exactly represented in Unicode (as of 2013 Unicode Version 6.2).

The English version also lists eight accents on: acute accent ( '), grave accent (`), circumflex (^), Caron ( caron ) (), macron (¯ ), tilde ( ~ ), diaeresis ( ¨) and over- dot ( ˙ ) and nine punctuation "", ( (? ) )..

In the French version there are only a hand drawn lowercase. There are 56 letters as in the English version (the top hook -z is missing), and two other apostrophe -style letters and ʿ. In addition, five of the letters are written with a sub-item rather than an underscore ( D, H, S, T and Z). These represent emphatic consonants, as in Arabic. The remaining characters shown with underscore ( c, q and x) represent the clicking sounds. Accents and punctuation are not listed in the French version.

Moreover, the content of the English and the French version match.

Notes:

• Ɑ / ɑ is the "Latin alpha (), not a" Latin -storey A " (). In Unicode, this representation variants are not considered different letters.
• The capital letter I, as a counterpart to the lowercase " i with dot " has no serifs, while the matching capital letter ɪ to lowercase " ()" has significant serifs (or head and foot bars analogous to the head bar of the " T"). This form is not found in Unicode (as of May, 2013, Unicode Version 6.2); an application for inclusion was not adopted until February 2013.

Version 1982

The revision of 1982 was conducted by Michael Mann and David Dalby, who had also participated in the Conference of Niamey. Since then, the African reference alphabet has 60 letters, some with significantly different shapes compared to the previous version of 1978. Moreover, the alphabet contains only lowercase letters, so it's a unikamerales alphabet.

The 32nd letter " " is the linearised tilde.