On 2016-10-10, Hans Åberg <haber...@telia.com> wrote: > I think that IPA might be designed for broad phonetic transcriptions > [1], with a requirement to distinguish phonemes within each given > language. For example, the English /l/ is thicker than the Swedish, > but in IPA, there is only one symbol, as there is no phonemic > distinction with each language. The alveolar click /!/ may be > pronounced with or without the tongue hitting the floor of the > mouth, but as there is not phonemic distinction within any given > language, there is only one symbol [2].
But the IPA has many diacritics exactly for this purpose. The velarized English coda /l/ is usually described as [l̴] with U+0334 COMBINING TILDE OVERLAY, or can be notated [lˠ] with U+02E0 MODIFIER LETTER SMALL GAMMA. The alveolar click with percussive flap hasn't made it into the standard IPA, but in ExtIPA it's [ǃ¡] (preferably kerned together). > Thus, linguists wanting to describe pronunciation in more detail are left at > improvising notation. The situation is thus more like that of mathematics, > where notation is somewhat in flux. There is improvisation when you're studying something new, of course, but there's a lot of standardization. -- The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
