Re: "Godless phonemes without complex voice modulation apparatus"

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. Of course, that correspondence is often
imperfect either because not all the sounds are represented or because of
historical spellings. Yet still in any alphabet, most letters correspond to
certain sounds, and most sounds to certain letters. If one concentrates too
much on the oddities of, say, English spelling, this is often forgotten.

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. In traditional
French IPA use, the sound that is represented by [t] is not the same one as
the sound represented by [t] in traditional English IPA use.


>Well, yes, I understand that.
>
>
>>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
(though it does less so in the 'English alphabet').


>True, but it's useless to tell someone about it without giving a
>description about it.
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.

kry@s:
j. 'mach' wust

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