CB Notation [was: glottals]

Andreas asked;
----- Original Message -----
From: "Andreas Johansson" <andjo@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Monday, January 26, 2004 6:02 PM
Subject: Re: [CONLANG] glottals


> Quoting Barbara Barrett <barbarabarrett@...>:
>
> > Barbara Babbled;
<snip>
> > replace post volic [t] with [?] so "hot" becomes /h;@?/ and "butter"
becomes
> > /b;v?3:/

> Andreas asked;
> What's the semicolon meaning here?
Barbara Burbbles,

it's an instuction that means "visualise upside down". I use the
Coutts-Barrett system (natch, as one of its co-devisors) and in that system
the syntax is;
 <visulisation inscuction>PHONEME<articulation instuction>
so /;v/ is v upside down, the IPA letter for the "weak u" vowel.
When the older ASCII/IPA systems were devised the @ symbol was made on a
16x8 pixel grid and looked rather like a backwards "e", so it made sense to
use it (as the closest match) for the shwa, however modern screen reolutions
mean in most fonts it is a round "a" (or alpha) surounded by an open
circle/spiral and the round "a" (or alpha) is the IPA for the low back
rounded, or "broad a" sound so it made sense to us to use the @ for it as it
looks much more like an alpha nowadays than a shwa (our "closest match" shwa
by the way is /6/ although /;e/ is acceptable in the CB notation) the /;@/
is therefore the back rounded weak broad "o" which in IPA is the alpha
upside down.

My copy of the full system is, alas, on a dead hard drive, and Robert Coutts
has buggered off to parts unknown for the time being, but it'll see the
light of day eventually. I think it'll be useful for conlangers as it covers
"disordered speech" (such as a nasal hiss) and "imagined sounds" (auditory
illusions) such as voiceless trills (implosive and explosive - like a cat's
purr!) and so might cover a lot of "alien" phonemes ;-)

I'll be putting up a website (I hope) around the end of the summer, and I'll
need to have had data-recovery done on the old hard disk by then, so a full
printable PDF of the CB system will be made available on the web (fingers
crossed) ;-)

Barbara

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