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Re: Furrin phones in my own lect!

From:John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
Date:Friday, March 17, 2006, 12:21
>I can hardly[*] distinguish between voiced and unvoiced stops (or [tS] >vs [dZ] rather than the English [tS_h] vs [dZ_h]), word-initially & >intervocalically.
[dZ_h]? You aspirate even the voiced ones?!?
>Mark J. Reed wrote: > > there should be a universal rule of IPA->CXS that small caps become > > simple uppercase > >I think the rule is actually that with vowels, CXS cap=IPA sc, whereas >with consonants, CXS cap=IPA turned, CXS cap+\=IPA sc. Note especially >[R], which isn't helped by French /r/ being [R] and not [R\] as one >might expect. Assuming there's a small cap and/or turned form. If not >the relationship's obviously arbitrary. > >-- >Tristan
[y\] would certainly be less confusing for the rounded palatal semivowel - compare [M M\] - but I guess one of the design principles was that common sounds should have common symbols. French and Chinese are two major languages that do have the rnd.pal.smw, but epiglottal fricativs are pretty rare. Similarily, the palatal lateral is more common (in European languages at least) than the velar, hence [L L\] are the way they are. With [R R\] I guess they (whoever "they" are) noticed the smallcaps = capital+blackslash pattern and went with it. The brevity principle also seems to explain oddities such as [F K 5]. I could ramble on about the way diacritics are handled etc. but right now I don't really want to. John Vertical

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Tristan Alexander McLeay <tristan@...>