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12 May 2022
Version history:
0.1, 22 June 2020
- 0.2, 9 August 2021
- 0.3, 9 May 2022
- 0.3.1, 12 May 2022
Scope of this document
The number of linguistics characters in the Unicode Standard is enormous. No attempt is made here to cover all of them. The following are observations of phenomena that have had an impact on Brill’s treatment of linguistic texts. It should be noted that the term ‘linguistics’ can cover the study of specific languages; the study of ‘language’ as such (sometimes called ‘theoretical linguistics’); comparative linguistics; and philology, which is the study of all sorts of language phenomena within the context of traditional scholarly disciplines, such as Classical Studies, theology, Semitic Studies, Arabic Studies, Sinology, and so on.
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Because of the subtlety of differences in appearance of these characters it is important to check (or spot-check) these characters by code point. The easiest way to do this in MS Office (Windows) is to copy the character whose Unicode value you wish to know from its source and paste it into a Word document. Once pasted, with the insertion point positioned just after the character in question, type Alt X, which converts the character to its Unicode hexadecimal value (typing Alt X again will toggle this back to the character). On macOS, you can use Character Viewer (sometimes referred to as ‘Emoji & Symbols’): in its Search field, paste the character whose value you wish to determine and it will show the required information instantly next to ‘Unicode’, as a hexadecimal value prefixed with ‘U+’.
For more information, see Using Unicode hexadecimal codes.
Latin twins in the Brill typeface
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| Character | Code point | Name | Remarks |
|---|---|---|---|
| ɑ | U+0251 | Latin alpha or ‘script a’ | There is a capital, Ɑ, U+2C6D, but this forms part of several Cameroon language orthographies, and it occurs but rarely in strictly linguistic contexts. Note also the existence of ᵅ U+1D45, ɒ U+0252, ᶛ U+1D9B, ꭤ U+AB64, and ꬰ U+AB30. |
| ꞵ | U+A7B5 | Latin beta | There is a capital, Ꞵ, U+A7B4, but this forms part of Gabonese orthographies, and it occurs but rarely in strictly linguistic contexts. Note the availability of the Latin glyph shape of Greek beta U+03B2 in the pre-version-4 Brill fonts through application of OpenType ss20. |
| ɣ | U+0263 | Latin gamma | There is a capital, Ɣ, U+0194, but this forms part of some African orthographies, and it occurs but rarely in strictly linguistic contexts. Note also the existence of ˠ U+02E0 Superscript Latin gamma, and ɤ U+0264 ‘Baby gamma’ or ‘ram’s horns’. |
| ẟ | U+1E9F | Latin delta or ‘script d’ or ‘insular d’ | Note also the existence of ƍ U+018D turned delta. |
| ɛ | U+025B | Latin epsilon or ‘open e’ | There is a capital, Ɛ, U+0190, but this forms part of some African (Niger-Congo) orthographies, and it is not ordinarily used occurs but rarely in strictly linguistic contexts. Note also the existence of ᶓ U+1D93, ɜ U+025C, ᶔ U+1D94, ɝ U+025D, ᶟ U+1D9F, ɞ U+025E, ʚ U+029A, ᴈ U+1D08, ᵋ U+1D4B, and ᵌ U+1D4C. |
| U+03B8 | Latin theta | This character has not yet been encoded in Unicode. The Latin glyph shape of Greek theta U+03B8 in the Brill fonts is accessible by application of OpenType ss20. |
| ɩ | U+0269 | Latin iota | There is a capital, Ɩ, U+0196, but this forms part of some African (Niger-Congo) orthographies, and it is not ordinarily used occurs but rarely in strictly linguistic contexts. Note also the existence of ᶥ U+1DA5 and ᵼ U+1D7C. Do not confuse with ꙇ Cyrillic iota U+A647. |
 | U+03BB | Latin lambda | This character has not yet been encoded in Unicode. The Latin glyph shape of Greek lambda U+03BB in the Brill fonts is accessible by application of OpenType ss20. Note also the existence of ƛ U+019B. |
| ʊ | U+028A | Latin upsilon | There is a capital, Ʊ U+01B1, but this forms part of some African (Niger-Congo) orthographies, and it is not ordinarily used occurs but rarely in strictly linguistic contexts. Note also the existence of ᵿ U+1D7F and ᶷ U+1DB7. |
| ɸ | U+0278 | Latin phi | Note also the existence of ᶲ U+1DB2 and ⱷ U+2C77. |
| ꭓ | U+AB53 | Latin khi | Note the availability of the Latin glyph shape of Greek khi U+03C7 in the pre-version-4 Brill fonts through application of OpenType ss20. There is a capital, Ꭓ, U+A7B3, but this is only used in German dialectology. Note also the existence of ꭔ U+AB54 and ꭕ U+AB55. |
| ꞷ | U+A7B7 | Latin omega | There is a capital, Ꞷ, U+A7B6. Both are used in African orthographies. Note also the existence of ɷ U+0277 and ꭥ U+AB65. |
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In linguistics, the following non-literal symbols are often confused:
| WRONG character | Code point | Name | CORRECT character | Code point | Name | Remarks | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Ø | U+00D8 | Latin capital letter O with stroke | ∅ | U+2205 | Empty set | The 'empty set' ‘empty set’ is used in linguistics to denote a zero morpheme (null morpheme) or zero-grade ablaut (or phonological 'zero'‘zero’). Often submitted by authors as Capital letter O with stroke. | ||
| = | U+003D | Equals sign | ⸗ | U+2E17 | Double oblique hyphen | The | 'double‘double oblique | hyphen'hyphen’ is often used in grammars, as a clitic marker or morpheme boundary marker. Often submitted by authors as Equals sign. |
| “ `` '' " | U+201C U+0060(2×) U+0027(2×) U+0022 | Left double quotation mark; Grave accent(2×); Apostrophe(2×); Quotation mark | ʺ | U+02BA | Modifier letter double prime | To transliterate the Cyrillic hard sign Ъ ъ (capital and lowercase) in the Latin script. Note that the double prime ʺ consists of just one U+02BA character and that this exhibits no casing behaviour. | ||
| ‘ ` ' | U+2018; U+0060; U+0027 | Left single quotation mark; Grave accent; Apostrophe | ʹ | U+02B9 | Modifier letter prime | To transliterate the Cyrillic soft sign Ь ь (capital and lowercase) in the Latin script. Note that the single prime ʹ U+02B9 exhibits no casing behaviour. |