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

From:Herman Miller <hmiller@...>
Date:Saturday, January 27, 2001, 22:10
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. -- languages of Azir------> ---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/lang/index.html>--- hmiller (Herman Miller) "If all Printers were determin'd not to print any @io.com email password: thing till they were sure it would offend no body, \ "Subject: teamouse" / there would be very little printed." -Ben Franklin