History of The International Phonetic Alphabet - 1993 Revision and 1996 Update

1993 Revision and 1996 Update

The 1993 revision introduced three changes:

• The "additional" mid central vowel, ⟨ɜ⟩, and two new mid-central vowel letters, ⟨ɘ⟩ and ⟨ʚ⟩ (= ⟨ɞ⟩), were added to ⟨ə⟩ and ⟨ɵ⟩ in the vowel chart, producing their current distribution.
• The voiceless implosives ⟨ƥ, ƭ, ƈ, ƙ, ʠ ⟩ were dropped
• The glottal consonants (ejectives and implosives) were removed from the main chart, and set up with the clicks in a non-pulmonic box
• ⟨ə⟩ and ⟨ɐ⟩ are moved to the centerline of the vowel chart, indicating that they (like ⟨ʊ⟩) are not necessarily unrounded
• The dedicated rhotic diacritic, listed only as ⟨ɚ⟩ since 1976, was made explicit
• It was noted that subdiacritics may be moved above a letter to avoid interference from a descender
• The word "etc." is dropped from the list of tones, leading to confusion that the listed tone diacritics are the only ones available

In 1996 the misformed letter ⟨ʚ⟩ (closed epsilon) was corrected to ⟨ɞ⟩ (closed reversed epsilon). A few illustrations in the chart were changed: ⟨a˞⟩ was added for rhoticity, and ⟨i̠ ɹ̩⟩ were replaced with ⟨e̠ n̩⟩.