As I said, I can see the point you made concerning the i.t.a., Michael but that does not affect the point that I made that there are at least three different variants that have been used in American English dictionaries of the same basic concept, representing a voiced th in a manner that is readable as a plain text th if one ignores the typographic cruft.
TH WITH STRIKETHROUGH ITALIC TH LIGATED BY HOOK PLAIN TH LIGATED BY CROSSBAR three separate glyphic representations of the same character LEXICOGRAPHIC VOICED TH found in printed American English dictionaries that are designed to be readable as th, but typographically set apart to indicate how the word is to be pronounced The exact representation of the typographic difference does not matter so long as it is consistent within the same document but does not have to be consistent between documents. This is unlike the i.t.a. where the typographic distinction must be consistent even between different documents. That need for consistency between documents is why I now agree that the i.t.a. character should not be unified with this one. Now if one were to take a dictionary that used any one of those three forms mentioned above and consistently replaced one glyph with another throughout the dictionary, would there truly be any difference in the text? If you can point out how that would be the case, I'll gladly concede the point. As for the name used for this character, I don't really have a preference as long as it does not lock in one specific glyph.
