Re: More ASCII IPA suggestions

Quoting Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>:


> >[snip]
> > > May I also propose [w\] (or [w*]) for bilabial approximant
> > > as in Hlasa Tibetan [NA:_Lw\@N_H], a proper name.
> > > I use Greek psi for this as a compromise between IPA
> > > [p\] and [v\].
> >
> >
> >Wouldn't [B\] (or [B*]) be better - it relates to [B] as [v\] ([v*]) to
> [v]?
>
> [B\] is already taken by the bilabial trill,
> and {w} is the usual romanization for the thing,
> e.g. _Ngawang_ (it's {Nag.dbaN} in Tib. Orthogr.)
[slap myself]

How did I manage to miss that? [w\] it is then.


Quoting Barbara Barrett <barbarabarrett@...>:

> Andreas Answered;
> > You could always use [^*] for mid-centralizing and
> > consign the backslash to oblivion, or use \ as a less
> > confusable alternative to ` -- cf. the typo-problem above
> > and the fact that people tend to mix up ` and '!
>
> ...and...
>
> > I've grown rather attached to ` for retroflexes, but I of course agree
> it's
> > not problem-free.
>
> Barbara Babbles;
> in CB with its 'visualization-phoneme-pronunciation syntax for multi
> character graphemes had different solutions.
>
> anything that followed ^ was a superscript or over-diacritic and not a
> phoneme so "x" after "^" was the mid centralized diacritic in that position
> and not the velar fricative: EG;
>
> /e^x/ = mid centralized /e/
That makes plenty of sense, actually. I'll be using that, I think.

> For retroflex we took a cue from the IPA; every phoneme in the Retroflex
> column was a character from the Alveolar column with a rightward hooked
> extended stem or leg, so to "retroflex" a phoneme all we needed was a
> pronunciation symbol. we chose "<" because the easy mnemonic was the
> leftward chevron points *against* (retro)  the direction of reading, and it
> was "open" to the right as the IPA "hook" was. so the entire alveolar and
> retroflex equivalents sequence were;
>
> t  d   to  t< d< ,  n  to   n< ,  r   to r< , ;r  to   ;r<
> (" ; " meant  "imagine character upside down" to 'see' the IPA one)
> s  z  to  s< z< , l  to  l< , and  t'  to  t'<
>
> Just a different solution ;-). But we too loathed the backslash and grave.
> The backslash because it interrupted the flow of reading too much, and the
> grave because in too many faces/fonts it simply was too small - easy to
> mistake for the font's apostrophe - or even miss altogether.
The '<' is, of course, already taken in my scheme.

Why couldn't Latin simply had a retroflex series! :)

> One problem we never cracked was how to always differentiate the capitol I
> from the lower case l and the number 1 regardless of the typeface used by
> the viewer because in some sans serif typefaces these characters are
> indistinguishable. All we could come up with was the rather clunky
> prescriptive that CB should always be written and read in a Serif typeface!
> We were not happy about that, but it was all we could come up with :-(
My scheme avoids '1' (outside tonal stuff, anyway, where it's safely put
withing '<' '>'), but 'I' vs 'l' can still be problematic. Damnable sans-serif
fonts! :)

                                                   Andreas