> On 10 Oct 2016, at 03:13, Doug Ewell <[email protected]> wrote: > > Denis Jacquerye wrote: > >> Regarding the superscript q, in some rare cases, it is used to >> indicate pharyngealization or a pharyngeal consonant instead of the >> Latin letter pharyngeal voiced fricative U+0295 ʕ, the modifier letter >> reversed glottal stop U+02C1 ˁ or the modifier letter small reversed >> glottal stop U+02E4 ˤ. >> ... > > Sounds like good material to include in a proposal.
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]. 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. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonetic_transcription 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_clicks
