Re: [QUESTION] What does IPA L-tilde stand for?

> Date:         Mon, 29 Apr 2002 13:57:49 +0100
> From: =?iso-8859-1?q?Jan=20van=20Steenbergen?= <ijzeren_jan@...>
>
>  --- Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>
> > I think LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH TILDE is in Unicode as a precomposed
> > character because it's used to write Polish. The tilde also appears as
> > a combining diacritical mark, and that should normally be used for the
> > IPA diacritic (which means velarized or pharyngealized).
> >
> > However, some implementions of Unicode will insist on using a combined
> > glyph if it exists, so the Polish l-with-tilde gets included in the
> > IPA set.
>
> Polish uses an L-with-stroke. Most people pronounce it like [w], though
> older people, who were born in pre-war parts of Poland that later became
> part of the USSR, tend to pronounce it like the thick Russian [l]. I have
> never seen the stroke replaced by a tilde.
You're right, I misremembered. My next guess is that l-tilde got into
Unicode because it is in fact used frequently in IPA, and it might be
hard for some implementations to put the diacritic in the right place.
(In fact, U026B doesn't have a decomposition in the charts. I assumed
it would be U006C U0334. Weird).

> The only thing I can think of myself, is that SMALL L WITH TILDE (SAMPA:
> [5]) must be some sort of nasalized [l] playing the role of a vocal.
See http://www.diku.dk/students/thorinn/xsamchart.gif . It's not
nasalized, it's velarized.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)

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