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An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger, and the proposed alphabet was revised in 1982. The conference recommended the use of single letters for a sound (actually a phoneme) instead of using two or three-letter combinations or letters with diacritical marks. The African Reference Alphabet is clearly related to the Africa Alphabet and reflected practice based on the latter (including use of IPA characters). The Niamey conference also built on work of a previous UNESCO-organized meeting on harmonization of transcriptions of African languages, that was held in Bamako, Mali in 1966. ==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" (x15pxx15px) not "Latin script a" (x15pxx15px). In Unicode, Latin alpha and are not considered as separate characters. * The upper case I, the counterpart of the lower case i, does not have crossbars (x15px) while the upper case counterpart of the lower case ɪ has them (x15px). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「African reference alphabet」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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