Re: sibilants

On Tue, 2008-08-19 at 10:54 -0400, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 12:07 PM, David McCann <david@...> wrote:
> > I don't care about all this #!*$ CXS stuff,
>
> Oookay.  I don't think the tone is necessary.  CXS may seem
> superfluous to you, but it does have the advantage of being easy to
> type, even for those of us who rarely have cause to enter IPA symbols
> outside of email to this very list...
My distaste for CXS and the like was not intended as a reflection in its
users (we're *nice* people on this list!); it just reflects my inability
to remember it and my utter bafflement as to why people are still using
it after a decade of Unicode and configurable keyboards.

> Those extra symbols allow for greater precision when providing a
> phonetic transcription out of context, which, coincidentally, happens
> a lot with conlangs, where we're not just transliterating phonemic
> writing systems or presenting transcribed speech to someone familiar
> with the language.  Obviously you can't have enough symbols to
> represent every possible articulation precisely, but where there are
> obvious distinctions to be made, creating obvious gaps in the IPA, it
> makes sense to fill those gaps.
My point was that you only need such precision in an initial
description, and you can do it with diacritics added to familiar
symbols. The more symbols you have in general use, the more people will
grumble that it's a bother to type them and baffle me with Klingonese.

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