In Times New Roman, which is the default font for MS Word (probably the best known word processor), the letters “a” and “ɑ” are indistinguishable in italics. The IPA is not meant to be used in italics, however a phonemic transcription is enclosed by solidi and some software consider words between asterisks should be renderd in bold, words between low lines should be underlined and words between solidi should be… italicised. Therefore, phonemic transcriptions in an e-mail are sometimes italicized and /a/ and /ɑ/, which represent different sounds, cannot be distinguished.
In the Cyrillic alphabet, many letters have a similar form in capital and in lower-case. That’s also the case for the letter el (Л л). However, a small capital el has been encoded (ᴫ, U+1D2B) and the only difference with the small el is that “in italic style, the glyph is obliqued, not italicized”. (UPA is usually used in italics.) Would it be possible to introduce a Latin small IPA letter a which, in italic style, would be obliqued, not italicized?
