The use of Phonetic and Other Sybmols in （语音和其他Sybmols的使用）.pdf

The use of Phonetic and other Symbols in Dictionaries: A brief survey May 08, 2006 Asmus Freytag, Ph.D. Summary This Unicode Technical Note presents the result of a brief survey about the use of special sym- bols to represent phonetic and other information in dictionaries. The survey intends to document specific examples of typical usage, rather than provide a complete summary of existing practices. Many dictionaries use The International Phonetic Alphabet [IPA], which is fully described else- where. A few of the special symbols mentioned in this document are not encoded, but would have to be realized with special fonts or ligatures. Phonetic symbols Dictionaries use a number of different methods to indicate the pronunciation of terms. Some are based on IPA, others employ other symbols, in particular barred or ligated di- and trigraphs based on small Latin letters as well as the use of diacritics across two letters. While the systems are different, there is some common ground, and systems for use in monolingual English and monolingual German dictionaries may sometimes use the same symbol for the same sound. For this survey, several dictionaries were researched and their notational systems are compared here to each other and to the available characters in the Unicode standard. Characters that are readily available in Unicode are not separately discussed, as they make up the vast majority of characters in any of the systems investigated, however, in some cases, recent editions of the Unicode Standard have added some of the characters discussed here. The Unicode Consortium continues to add phonetic symbols and general symbols to the Unicode Standard, whenever they meet the criteria for character encoding