Re: Bilabial clicks

On Fri, 18 Jan 2002 02:07:47 -0000, And Rosta <a.rosta@...> wrote:

>Paul:
>> the IPA (unwisely I feel) opted to adopt the Africanist symbols
>> for the clicks.
>
>I agree. The post-Kiel click symbols are horrible.
>
>> I think in terms of allowing for possible but as yet undocumented
>> sounds the IPA should have devised a diacritic indicating 'velaric
>> ingressive' (or better, velaric ingressive AND velaric egressive)
>> would have been a better solution, but....
>
>How would this interesting-sounding scheme work, given that
>(simplifying a bit) manner-variation in clicks occurs at the
>dorsal/tectal point of occlusion, while there is place variation
>in terms of the anterior point of occlusion?
I've given this some thought, though I haven't yet come up with
a completely satisfactory solution. My gut feeling is that the
double articulation needs to be addressed as well as the initiatory
mechanism. Perhaps the best way would be: [anterior stop + velaric
diacritic + dorsal stop/affricate] with the over- or under-tie bar
used to indicate affricates.

So a bilabial click with velar ejective release would be something
like (in nonce ASCII, assuming <!> for the yet-to-be-designated
velaric ingressive diacritic): [p!^k']; a voiceless retroflex nasal
click could be either [t.!^N_o] or [n.!^N_o]; ad nauseum...

It is essentially what is done in some flavors of ASCII-IPA, and I
think it offers more flexibility than current IPA practice. I firmly
believe that a phonetic alphabet should be capable of clearly
indicating not only currently described linguistic sounds, but any
_potential_ linguistic sounds. Currently there is no way to transcribe
the sound of Livagian <pkh>, a velaric egressive labial trill, but
with this sort of scheme a velaric _egressive_ diacritic could be
designated, <*>, and the segment could be transcribed [pB_o*^k] or
perhaps [pB_o*^k'] assuming ejective release. (It could be simplified
to [B*^k(')] if one assumes that the anterior occlusion must be
voiceless & that bilabial trills are always pre-stopped.)

Bfowol

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