Re: sounds I can't find!!!

Andreas Johansson wrote:
> Quoting "J. 'Mach' Wust" <j_mach_wust@...>:
>
> > On Mon, 16 Aug 2004 08:04:01 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...>
> > wrote:
> >
> > >Americanist and Czech c-hacek is [tS].
> >
> > That sign is also found in old Europe's linguistics, but rather in
> > historic
> > linguistics (and dialectology) as part of an alternative system to IPA.
> > I
> > think that the 'Americanist' use you're referring to is including this
> > sign
> > in a mostly IPA transcription in order to have a single sign for the
> > phoneme /tS/?
>
> I'm not deeply familiar with the Americanist system, but other
> particularities
> include [y] and [ü] for IPA [j] and [y], which cannot be motivated by a
> desire
> to have single signs for single phonemes.
>
I suspect the reasoning was something like this:
1-- there must be one symbol/one sound correspondence in _phonemic_
transcription. This is Gospel.
2-- "c" and "j"  for [tS, dZ] are sanctioned by (a) Sanskritist usage and
(b) resemblance to English spelling. /S/ was "s^". Both c and j often had a
hacek too, which was actually redundant, but many writers used it-- you had
to put it in your ms. by hand, of course.
3-- therefore, IPA [j] must be replaced by "y", again for (a,b) above.
4-- therefore IPA [y] must be replaced by...well, ü, which is easy to make
on the typewriter, and is familiar from German (which we all know, of
course-- it being one of the language requirements for the PhD.)

If you wanted to use IPA in your ms., it meant leaving blank spaces to be
filled in later by hand.  That could give rise to errors.

The use of "c/c^, j^/j, y, ü" in _phonetic_ transcriptions was simply a
quick-and-dirty carry-over from phonemic usage. If a journal/publisher
actually owned an IPA font, it was used, and the symbols were written
correctly.

When I began to work on Buginese, which has many glottal stops, I filed the
 off the ? key. Theoretically I had to backspace and type the . for a real
?, but in practice it hardly mattered.

When IBM invented their golf-ball-size type thing, it solved a lot of those
problems, since inter alia you could get an IPA ball, but it was still a
chore to switch balls in mid-stream so to speak.  But since there was
usually only one of those expensive machines per department, that was the
secretary's job anyway.

I typed my entire 900page dissertation on an electric SCM machine-- it had
IIRC 2 dead keys and a couple other keys where you could replace the little
type-head quite easily (though your fingers got dirty). The only drawback
was that the little extra type-heads cost around $5.00 each, and tended to
get lost....

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