>I remain a bit skeptical. You are focusing here on the freedom
of the font designer, who usually has a lot of freedom for the
design of the latin small letter a, but which is severely
restricted as soon as the font is also used to display IPA,
because there the a needs to have specific features. On the
other hand, IPA was really intended as an extension of the
Latin script, and not as a script of its own, and many African
languages make heavy use of some selected IPA letters in their
orthography.
Ah, but there should be a measure of freedom for African type
designers to stray from the original shapes to something that
might no longer be acceptable for the purpses of IPA. There
must be a clear distinction between IPA as phonetic
transcription for research purposes, and IPA as a source of
graphemes for an orthography. There is a degree of freedom of
glyph shapes in orthographies that doesn't exist in IPA.
Peter
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