African Reference Alphabet - 1978 Version

1978 Version

Separate versions of the conference's report were produced in English and French. Different images of the alphabet were used in the two versions, and there are a number of differences between the two.

The English version proposed an alphabet of 57 letters, given in both upper and lower-case forms. Eight of these are formed from common Latin letters with the addition of an underline mark (_). Several of the glyphs, mostly upper-case forms, are unusual and cannot (yet) be accurately represented in Unicode.

This version also listed eight accents (acute accent ( ´ ), grave accent ( ` ), circumflex ( ^ ), caron ( ˇ ), macron ( ¯ ), tilde ( ˜ ), trema ( ¨ ), and a superscript dot (˙) and nine punctuation marks ( ? ! ( ) « », ; . ).

In the French version, the letters were hand-printed in lower case only. Only 56 of the letters in the English version were listed – omitting the hooktop-z – and two further apostrophe-like letters (ʾ and ʿ) were included. Also, five of the letters were written with a subscript dot instead of an underscore as in the English version (ḍ, ḥ, ṣ, ṭ and ẓ). (These represent Arabic-style emphatic consonants while the remaining underlined letters (c̱, q̱ and x̱) represent clicks.) Accents and punctuation do not appear. The French and English sets are otherwise identical.

Notes:

• Ɑ/ɑ is "Latin alpha" not "Latin script a" . In Unicode, Latin alpha and script an are not considered as separate characters.
• The upper case I, the counterpart of the lower case i, does not have crossbars while the upper case counterpart of the lower case ɪ has them .