Until a few weeks ago I could have told you what's in the first edition (1927) of the Africa Alphabet, but I moved the pamphlets from where they always used to be (tucked into Albright's history of the IPA, in fact) to somewere more logical, and now I can't find them.

But it's very unlikely that you'll learn the name of either the designer or the typographer of the characters: that was craft, done anonymously.

Note that the more recent Africa writing-scheme (which may have come out of the Niamey conference?), published in a big green book coauthored by Dalby, eschews capitals entirely. (A bad idea, I say.)
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...

----- Original Message ----
From: Don Osborn <dzo@...>
To: qalam@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2007 9:09:55 AM
Subject: Re: Origin of Ɓ?

Thanks Peter. What I'm especially interested to know is who designed
the upper case letters and how it was decided to do so and pair them
with the lower case ones (in this case, yes, phonetic IPA characters
that have been adopted into various orthographies) .

It's a question about the history, that's all. My assumption based on
the Africa Alphabet document is that this decision had not been made
before 1930.

The 1966 Bamako meeting doesn't illustrate upper case versions of the
hooked letters. (Actually the discussions re upper case were mostly
about whether to use, say, the uppercase B for the implosive b rather
than the hooked lowercase É" - this convention was never adopted but
you will still see this kind of workaround these days in e-mail and such).

There were frequent references to the system used by Bargery, which
apparently was published in 1934. (I don't have a copy to verify the
form of uppercase letters)

By the time of the 1978 Niamey coference (and the apparently
unconnected work on ISO-6438), the current usage of uppercase hooked
letters was established.

So, where between 1930 and 1978 was the current convention
established? As early as 1934?

(I'll also pass the question on to John Philips of Hirosaki
University, who has studied the history of Hausa orthographies. )

Don

--- In qalam@... com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@. ..> wrote:
>
> Phonetic characters don't come in capital and lowercase forms, so
when the hooked letters were adopted into the Africa Alphabet, someone
decided to make capitals to go along with them.