2006 UTC Ideas for improving the article Great article I took the liberty of replacing U 02E1 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL L in the article with U 02C8 MODIFIER LETTER VERTICAL LINE where it is used to indicate a stressed syllable The former character is incorrect since although it appears as a vertical line in sans serif fonts it actually appears like a superscript lowercase l or a superscript 1 in serif fonts like Charis SIL and Doulos SIL I only noticed this because I have a CSS hack that applies to all uses of the IPA template and forces a different font for them I m taking phonology at U Hawaii at M noa so I ll be sure to add anything interesting about Hawaiian that comes up Oh crap Didn t even catch that I hope I haven t done it elsewhere Well like I said I only noticed it because I have a CSS hack in place I only wish that the rest of the world had the SIL IPA fonts installed Again glad you like the article The replacement symbol you used looked alright to me but so did the original symbol It s a stretch to claim t he former character is incorrect on the basis of its appearance in fonts that 99 99 of users do not have Most people have never heard of the Summer Institute for Linguistics The character that I used to mark syllable stress is the one that Wikipedia presents for use in the IPA list of symbols below the edit box So if you feel you have a better symbol then you should contact Wikipedians who are in a position to consider implementing your suggestion s You might try Brion Vibber If you learn something new about Hawaiian phonology at UH do let us know But remember Wikipedia does not want anything that is not already published So if it s new it might be unpublished and therefore undesirable under Wikipedia policy The font used to display the characters is unimportant Their character encodings are specific On the basis of the two Unicode names I argue that U 02E1 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL L is inappropriate as the stress marker in IPA Checking the appropriate Unicode chart on their website I find that U 02C8 MODIFIER LETTER VERTICAL LINE is listed under the section Miscellaneous phonetic modifiers with the comment primary stress downstep precedes letter or syllable modified On the other hand U 02E1 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL L is given in the section Additions based on 1989 IPA just below U 02E0 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL GAMMA which has the comment these modifier letters are occasionally used in transcription of affricates So it s fairly clear that the Unicode standard makes a distinction between their intended purposes I note that in the bottom of the edit box the two are given in sequence with U 02C8 immediately following U 02E1 It s easily possible to press the first of the two accidentally I will bring this up at m Help talk Special characters and ask someone to reorder them for clarity Your explanation and argument sounds good I don t know the layout of the insert box characters on other users screens When I edit the IPA characters are displayed in two lines The first line ends with tiny lowercase superscripts h w a j like character gamma lefty glottal n The second line begins with the character I used for stress mark followed by other stress marks length mark something too obscure to make out a mid height black square apparently used to mark the end of a series of related symbols and then the line ends with the double curly bracketed IPA Based on your explanation it appears that the first line of IPA characters is broken in a way that misled me into thinking that the last member of the series of superscripts is the first member of a series of stress marks Bad line break And there is no mid height black square nor significant white space separating the superscript series from the stress mark series Not seeing that previously I used the first mark because it looks the same as the second but darker Of course it also happened because a tiny superscripted sans serif L looks nearly identical to a tiny superscripted vertical line If you have the motivation maybe you can suggest more than just reordering in your communication with the Special Characters people The addition of a separation character between the series of superscripts and the series of stress marks will help Here s my best suggestion to offer on this matter persuade the Special Characters folks to implement appropriate new text for the ho