Re: OT: [Q] is a vowel?! (was Re: Articulatory phonetics (was Re: THEORY: unergative))

On Sun, Feb 22, 2004 at 09:15:54PM -0500, Trebor Jung wrote:
> makes me want to reform XS. I mean, who's ever heard of spelling a vowel as
> a consonant except in...XS?! Even English didn't get it this wrong...
Uhm, you don't have a lot of choice if you're limited to ASCII, which
only has a grand total of ten vowel letters - twelve if you throw in Y.
There are a lot more than ten or twelve vowel sounds.  So your choice is
to use letters that normally represent consonants, or else resort to
punctuation or currency or other symbols, which is how we wound up with
& (or the worse {) to represent the American English short-a sound that
is represented in IPA as an a-e ligature.  Personally, I think
consonants are a better choice in general.

And Q is not the only one.  As we just covered in the thread on Japanese
Romanization, the Japanese "u" sound (which is the same as a cardinal
/u/ except without lip rounding) is spelled [M] in XS.  In IPA, it looks
like a double-u (as opposed to a w, which is only *called* a "double-u".
:))

-Mark