Narrow Romic utilized italics to distinguish fine details of pronunciation; Broad Romic was cruder, and in it the vowels had their English "short" sounds when written singly, and their "long" sounds when doubled: If the beginner has once learnt to pronounce a, e, i, o, u, as in glass, bet, bit, not, dull, he simply has to remember that long vowels are doubled, as in biit—"beat", and fuul—"fool", and diphthongs formed by the juxtaposition of their elements, as in boi—"boy" and hai—"high" [...]Sweet adopted from Ellis and earlier philologists a method creating new letters by rotating existing ones, as in this way no new type would need to be cast: There is, however, one simple method of forming new letters without casting new types, which is very often convenient.
He resurrected three Anglo-Saxon letters, ash ⟨æ⟩, eth ⟨ð⟩ and thorn ⟨þ⟩, the first two of which had the pronunciations they retain in the IPA.
[citation needed][these may have been used earlier] The following tables outline consonants and vowels as laid out in A Primer of Phonetics (1892).
⟨ñ ᵹ ɹ λ ꞁ þ⟩ were eventually replaced with ⟨ɲ ɣ ʕ ʎ ʟ θ⟩ in the IPA.
[1] Apart from Sweet's use of italic h for voicelessness, the rest of the alphabet continues intact in the modern IPA.
In the case of the mid back unrounded vowel ⟨a⟩, the description of its place of articulation does not accord well with some of the words given as examples.
Indices were used to avoid complex detail when it would be understood, as ⟨e1, o1⟩ for English diphthongal [eɪ, oʊ] Glottal stop was x, the velar nasal q. Digraphs were used where later Sweet would use distinct characters.
Consonants took diacritics for fronting, as in dental ⟨t̖⟩,[5] or retraction, as in uvular ⟨k̗⟩, retroflection, as in ⟨t⸸⟩, and protrusion, as in interdental ⟨t†⟩.
An italic ⟨r⟩ was used for trills, e.g. Italian ⟨rr⟩ (and voiceless Welsh ⟨rhr⟩), German ⟨ghr⟩, bilabial ⟨bhr⟩, and epiglottal ⟨ʀr⟩ and ⟨ʀhr⟩ as in Arabic ain and heth.
Tone and intonation were indicated with iconic symbols such as rising ⟨/⟩, falling ⟨\⟩, level ⟨−⟩, rising-falling ⟨^⟩, etc., as in early IPA usage.