Re: "Godless phonemes without complex voice modulation apparatus"

On Tuesday, April 26, 2005, at 01:37 , J. 'Mach' Wust wrote:

> On Mon, 25 Apr 2005 16:54:12 -0700, B. Garcia <madyaas@...> wrote:
>
>> On 4/25/05, Joe <joe@...> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> Because, I suppose, IPA things have a specific meaning. Natural
>>> alphabets do not.
>
> I belief it's the point of alphabets that there is a certain
> correspondence
> between letters and sounds.
True - AFAIK all 'natural' alphabets began with the letters corresponding
to fairly circumscribed sounds. They were 'phonetic' in the sense that
adjective is understood by the 'person in the street'.

> Of course, that correspondence is often
> imperfect either because not all the sounds are represented or because of
> historical spellings.
Yep - but this is after a few centuries - and more often than not when the
original alphabet is applied to some other language than the one it
evolved for.

[snip]
> On the other hand, many IPA transcriptions (or even most IPA
> transcriptions
> assuming that most use of IPA is made in dictionaries and not in narrow
> phonetic analysis) are not that specific in their meaning.
Yes, indeed - and the young lady in question specifically spoke of
_phonemes_ and not of phones; so we are dealing with the use of IPA for a
_broad_ transcription, not a narrow one as Joe seems to be suggesting.

[snip]
>>> For example, I could express an alien sound as 'qrxp', which is
>>> perfectly fine, but I could never transcribe such a thing into IPA.
>
> I don't see what's wrong about [qrxp]. It makes perfectly sense in IPA
It does - I assume /r/ is syllabic.

[snip]
> Perhaps you shouldn't have asked that person for the sounds of that
> language, but for a romanization of that devanaagarii letters. It may be
> that the sounds are inconceivable to human understanding, but there is no
> question that devanaagarii is romanizable.
Quite so - if she can put the language into Devanagari, then certainly she
could, if she were so minded, put the thing into Roman script.
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On Tuesday, April 26, 2005, at 02:07 , B. Garcia wrote:

[snips]
> Well, she's most likely a troll.
Could be - the several inconsistencies in what she says would be
consistent with trolling  ;)
[snip]
> Anyway, it was more of an inquiry onto how *you all* would do it. I am
> interested to see what the devanagari reads.... it could seriously just
> be random crap designed to stir the shit, so to speak.
Yes, I would just get the Devanagari romanized and see. It may, as you say,
  turn out to be just random crap - tho doubtless she will claim it ain't
random crap to the initiated  ;)

Ray
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http://home.freeuk.com/ray.brown
ray.brown@freeuk.com
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Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight,
which is not so much a twilight of the gods
as of the reason."      [JRRT, "English and Welsh" ]

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