Re: OT: Phonetics (IPA)

Mark J. Reed wrote:


> My leave of absence was a bit premature, it turned out.  I'm back for
> now. :)
It _is_ addictive, isn't it........? Glad you're back.

He later wrote:
>Many linguists use slightly modified versions of the IPA, (snip).  Part of
the reason for this
is the history - American linguists were in the field cataloguing
native American languages before the IPA was defined, and they came
up with their own symbols.>

My personal favorite is Boas/Sapir's use of ! for glottalized/ejective
consonants-- p!, t! etc.  But a lot of this, I think, had to do with
accommodating strange sounds to the limits of the standard typewriter
keyboard, or fonts available to most publishers in those days.  Perhaps,
too, in the 1900-19-teens the IPA wasn't totally accepted in the US.

>In any case, the "version of the IPA" with the hacek isn't really a
version of the IPA, nor is it a completely separate system. >

It's also a kind of shorthand.  Once you're familiar with the sounds of a
language, you start simplifying your phonetic transcription-- it becomes
semi-phonemic. In my very first field notes from Buginese, I used correct
IPA; once I started taking data in large quantities,  I used a variety of
shortcuts-- "c" with/without hacek for [tS], plain schwa instead of
barred-i/schwa/V for their allophones of /@/ etc.  And I ended up, often,
just writing words in Indonesian spelling--e.g. "tj" for [tS].

The question of cluster vs. unit is tricky.  The old phonemicists had
recourse to the concept of "juncture", which they never quite managed to
define.  (Essentially it meant "syllable boundary", but that's tricky too,
since "syllable" may depend on more than just phonetics.)  So there's a
juncture in 'cat shit', but not in 'catch it' (the classic ex. is night rate
vs. nitrate),  This is probably crossing the boundary from pure phonetics
into phonology-- note that you can subsitute [?] for the /t/ before
juncture, but not in the unit affricate.

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