Re: Transcription exercise

On Fri, 22 Sep 2006 21:38:40 +0200, Benct Philip Jonsson
<bpjonsson@...> wrote:

>Paul Roser skrev:
>
>> The number of languages that distinguish two voiceless lateral fricatives is
>> quite small - off the top of my head, Bura, Cocopa, Northern Diegueno
>> distinguish dental/alveolar and palatalized/palatal versions, Toda and
>> A-hmao distinguish dental/alveolar and retroflex versions, and one of the
>> Central Highland languages of Papua (Wahgi or Nii IIRC) has voiceless
>> lateral fricative allophones of its *three* laterals - dental, alveolar,
>> velar, but I think they only contrast word-finally.
>
>So more symbols *would* be needed.  I think the (ab)use of the
>'lateral release' diacritic with fricative symbols might
>be justified on the grounds that with non-occlusives
>the lateral configuration would be expected to be present
>throughout the sound.
The lateral release diacritic would be an acceptable stop-gap, but I think
that, for voiceless lateral fricatives at least, adding the 'belt' to a
lateral would be the best solution for IPA (and IIRC the ZBB X-Sampa has
symbols for lateral fricatives at just about every possible POA). Luciano
Canepari has designed a rather exhaustive expansion of the IPA (
(http://venus.unive.it/canipa/), and I think there is work afoot to get it
into the private-use section of Unicode and build a font for general release.

One thing he does that I rather like is dump the current IPA voiced lateral
fricative (that has evolved into an l+3 character) and replaces it with a
mirror image of the voicless lateral - so voiceless is belt on left, voiced
is belt on right - which is probably inconvenient for dyslexics, but works
fine for me. But then, I think that the IPA should have more symbols, rather
than less, and would like to see a number of additions made to the official
alphabet....

-Bfowol