From: evan@hpl.hp.com (Evan Kirshenbaum)
Subject: Re: RFC: ASCII representation of IPA (technical draft)
Date: Mon, 14 Sep 1992 17:59:14 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories

I've been away from the office (and news) for a few days, and there
have been several good replies to the original proposal.  Rather than
respond to each message separately, I'm going to address them all
here.

In no particular order:

I like the idea of including a table in the draft.

/I<rnd>/ should definitely have been /I./.  I added the /./ diacritic
after the first draft was done, and I just missed it.

I'm sure I meant to use the voiceless symbol for the ejectives.  I'm
not sure how it got in there as /b<'>/ rather than /p<'>/.

I like the idea of using /B/ and /P/ for the bilabial fricatives.  I
don't know how I missed the fact that they were both free.

Using /&/, /a/, /A/ for the low, unrounded vowels makes a lot more
sense than /A/, /a<cnt>/, /a/.  It keeps /a/ for the cardinal, which
is where it belongs.

{fzd} for "pharyngealized" sounds like a reasonable idea.

Mark Rosenfelder recommended adding feature abbreviations for other
vowel diacritics (raised, lowered, more/less rounded, particularly
open, etc.)  That sounds fine to me, but the abbreviations don't
spring to mind.  I'm open to suggestions.

I'd like to suggest that we *don't* make a distinction between, say
{rzd} and {rsd} ("rhoticized" vs. *"raised") and that we allow people
on the two sides of the Atlantic to choose to use a "z" or and "s" as
they spell the word. (For "palatalized", "labialized", etc.)

I vacillate on whether I like /[/ for dentals.  On the positive side,
it certainly looks something like the IPA diacritic.  On the negative
side, having unbalanced brackets makes me uncomfortable.  (It also
does the same to my editor (which does paren matching).)  At the
moment, I think I'd probably vote for the idea, as we should certainly
have a one character diacritic for dentals.  We should probably *not*
allow closing delimiters as diacritics, though.

I don't want to force people to put spaces between syllables.  Most of
the time the word breaks and pauses are more important.  (The
exception--pronunciation of individual words--is, admittedly quite
common, especially on alt.usage.english.)  I therefore don't want to
use stress marks as segment diacritics.  The "`" symbol is still
available, and I would suggest using it for ejectives or possibly
implosives.  We could use it for both (until someone tells me that
there are voiced ejectives or voiceless implosives--I think that the
latter are physically impossible).

/"/ for {cnt} sounds ok, unless it could better be used for something
else.  To make simple segments, the following still need to be spelled
out:
	trl	trilled
	imp	implosive
	lbd	labiodental
	vcd	voiced
	vls	voiceless
	pal	palatal
	uvl	uvular
	lbv	labiovelar
	lat	lateral
	umd	upper-mid
	cnt	central
If we're running out of symbols (and we allow different meanings for
vowels and consonants), I'd suggest that /"/ be {cnt} for vowels and
{uvl} for consonants.

/./ for {rnd} isn't intuitive for me either (although a period *is*
round).  I'm open to better suggestions.

I agree with Ivan Derzhanski that we don't want digraphs.  It might be
a good idea, however, to allow people to write affricates as
consecutive segments and provide a separator when it is important to
note that two segments which would normally be affricates are not.
Perhaps /'n^t|SEt/ as opposed to /'n&tSR@l/. (Examples from English
are necessarily somewhat forced.)  I'm still a little uncomfortable
with using an "affricate" symbol, since in most cases it doesn't
matter (and isn't used in IPA transcription).  I suppose we should
provide it for the cases where it does matter.  I would be happier if
it could follow the segment like all other segmental diacritics.

I had forgotten that vowels could be pharyngealized.  Sigh.  I'd be
willing to let /~/ be pharyngealization (and velarization), but that
leaves us with needing to mark nasalization.  /M/ could work for
that, but we *really* need to have a symbol for palatal nasals.  I
agree that /M/ doesn't look like an enya.  Perhaps we should get a
diacritic for palatal articulation.  I guess the best system would be
something like
	/~/ for pharyngealization, velarization 
	/M/ for nasalization
	/^/ for palatal articulation
	/V/ for {lmd,bck,unr,vwl} (was /^/)
[If we did that, we could also use /^/ on vowels for {umd} or perhaps
"raised".] 

I think we may want to leave one or two diacritics (perhaps /+/ and
/=/) explicitly unspecified so that individual authors can use them to
mark the "feature of interest" in particular discussions when that
feature doesn't have a simple diacritic.

The most important missing diacritics are now "trilled" (I'm not happy
with /r<trl>/), and "voiceless" (ditto /l<vls>/).

Evan Kirshenbaum
    HP Laboratories
    3500 Deer Creek Road, Building 26U
    Palo Alto, CA  94304

    kirshenbaum@hpl.hp.com
    (415)857-7572