Re: Lateral fricatives (was: Names of Latin alphabet letters)

On Sat, 27 Jan 2001 12:24:33 +0000, Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
wrote:

>BTW I also find the SAMPA use of [K] to ASCIIfy the IPA belted-l symbol a
>strange way to denote the voiceless lateral fricative a strange choice.
>Does anyone know why was [K] chosen.
At least SAMPA _has_ a symbol for the lateral fricatives. That's pretty
much the only reason I use SAMPA (and even then, I cheat and use [&]
instead of [{], ['] for ["], and [,] for [%]). I need those lateral
fricatives, and Kirshenbaum's system forces you to hack something together
by using the <lat> diacritic or one of the ad-hoc symbols. I'd guess the
SAMPA authors were probably running out of symbols by the time they got to
[K], and chose it for its appearance rather than sound. (However, "$" seems
to me to be a better representation of the appearance of the IPA symbol for
the voiceless lateral fricative than "K".)

Well, since Unicode still looks pretty unlikely for email in the near
future (and even on the Web isn't very well supported yet), maybe I should
revive my KPA proposal (http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/kpa.html). Hmm, I
don't really like my representation of the voiced lateral fricative; I
guess I was probably going for the appearance (using the Z to imply the
second part of the l-ezh ligature), but since [D"] is unused at the moment,
maybe I should switch it. By analogy, [T"] for the voiceless lateral
fricative would be logical.

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