Re: Indication of non-syllabicity (WAS: Re: Celtica (WAS: Maggel))

Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:

> On Fri, Jun 18, 2004 at 07:22:11AM +0200, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> > I, OT3H, don't like it - you'd have to scan the word to the end to see
> > if there where a closing parantesis. Not to mention the possibility of
> > words like [ai(ts)na - is that two syllables, with a coda affricate in
> > the second one, or three ones, with an optinal [ts] cluster in the
> > middle?
>
> ?  I wasn't aware of this use of parentheses to indicate "optional"
> in CXS.  Doesn't that also interfere with the ) for ties, then?
Well, the optionality indication is in IPA itself, so I think we'd do best to
keep it.

As for ')' to indicate affricates and coarticulations, I do not much like it
(in the JXS system I created such are enclosed in '{' '}', if the need is felt
to indicate them explicitly), but unless it occurs inside an optional
segemental string, or the an optional string ends with what could be an
affricate or coarticulation, there can be no ambiguity when parsing a string
segment by segment. OTOH '(' for non-syllabicity will _always_ create parsing
ambuigity.

Now, you may retort that by using trailing diacritics, CXS (and IPA) forces you
to look ahead while parsing anyway. This is true, but it does only force you to
look a few characters ahead. The '(' will in many cases force you look forward
to the end of the string, no matter the length, so be certain.

                                                       Andreas

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