Re: IPA block in Unicode

On Sun, 7 Aug 2005 22:49:45 -0500, Herman Miller <hmiller@...> wrote:

>John Vertical wrote:
>> *"Squat reversed esh" and "turned r with fiskhook" (&#645; &#639;): I
>> have heard that these are "retroflex vowel" and "alveolar vowel", but
>> that makes little sense.
>
>These are used for the sounds in Mandarin Chinese written as "i" in
>pinyin, in words such as "shi" and "si". Not officially part of the IPA.
>They sound like prolonged versions of [z`] and [z], but without friction.
>
>> But about the "inverted glottal stop" (&#662;), "closed epsilon"
>> (&#666;) and the turned h's with left hook (&#686;) or with left hook
>> and a right tail (&#687;) I have no idea at all; nor about the whole of
>> "Phonetic Extensions" block with all the letters like "capital ou" or
>> "sideways m" or "ain".
>
>The "inverted glottal stop" was a lateral click (x in Zulu or Xhosa). I
>believe I've seen the turned h's with hooks on a web page on Chinese
>dialects. I don't know specifically which sounds they represent.
The turned-h with hook symbols are *rounded* versions of #645 and #639 above,
possibly on analogy with plain turned-h for the rounded semivowel equivalent
of [y].

Bfowol