Lepsius Standard Alphabet

The Standard Alphabet is a Latin-script alphabet developed by Karl Richard Lepsius. Lepsius initially used it to transcribe Egyptian hieroglyphs in his Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien and extended it to write African languages, published in 1853, 1854 and 1855, and in a revised edition in 1863. The alphabet was comprehensive but was not used much as it contained a lot of diacritic marks and was difficult to read and typeset at that time. It was, however, influential in later projects such as Ellis's Paleotype, and diacritics such as the acute accent for palatalization, under-dot for retroflex, underline for Arabic emphatics, and the click letters continue in modern use.