Re: How to Make Chicken Cacciatore (was: phonetics by guesswork)

Paul wrote: "Simple. If any attested language has a phonemic distinction
between two sounds, the IPA makes that distinction. It's as easy as that."

Actually, I think maybe this is because aspiration is a secondary
articulatory feature. So the IPA has no separate symbols for, say, /k_w/,
/b_j/, and /t_>/ because labialization, palatalization, and ejectivity.
Dentality, I guess, is only marked with a diacritic /_d/ because there
aren't enough characters available to make new characters for the dental
phones.

Nik wrote: "So far as I know, that's what the IPA *does* already do.  I
don't know of any IPA symbols for sounds that don't exist *somewhere*,
however uncommon it may be.

What about, say, unrounded /U/? Or does that exist in any natlangs?

"Which you could avoid if you'd simply learn the terminology ...

Which isn't very hard, especially the consonant terminology. OTOH, the vowel
terminology, IMHO, excluding '(un)rounded', is a bit hard to understand.

And anyway, that happening is about as likely as Aiola or Quechua becoming
the IAL (in the latter case, I think it'd be neat to learn Quechua :P)...

Cheers,

T

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