Talk:Americanist phonetic notation

message: I might be wrong, but I think the "APA symbols guide" that's included in the external links section is an Africanist alphabet, not an Americanist one. See for example the use of "c" for a palatal stop rather than an affricate, the absence of crossed lambda for "tl", and the presence of click symbols. And the fact that it's David Odden's website.
If that link was intended to show an Americanist alphabet, it should probably be removed. If its inclusion was intentional, then we need to at least call it an Africanist symbol guide to avoid confusion from people who will (quite naturally) think that a link to an APA guide on this page must mean an Americanist alphabet. Jiashudiwanjin (talk) 16:39, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title: Odden's "APA symbols guide"

message: The long quote contains much which seems to be just one person's individual opinions.  Many followers of "Americanist" traditions would claim that symbols like "š" have the advantage of being compositional (i.e. their sound value can be predicted from knowing the sound-value of the base letter plus the nature of the phonetic modification expressed by the diacritic symbol), while "ʃ" is just an arbitrarily unanalyzable symbol (and too many arbitrarily unanalyzable symbols become a burden on the memory)... AnonMoos (talk) 18:08, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Abercrombie quote

message: It would be nice to learn more about the origin and early history of the system in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Typical of the APA is the use of characters derived from Latin alphabets adapted to Slavic languages, especially Czech (š, č, ž), but also Polish (ś, ć, ł), and in ways which is identical with or at least closely approximates their use there (also of some simple characters such as c). I've wondered for some time now if there is a connection with the Prague School or an older scholarly tradition in the region, or with the transcription of Cyrillic into Latin, which naturally employed characters borrowed from Czech and Polish; officially in the case of Serbian and Belorussian, unofficially in the case of Russian and Bulgarian. APA could have (at least partly) grown organically out of attempts to convert into Latin characters Cyrillic-based transcriptions of Uralic, Caucasian, Altaic, Siberian, North American, and also Semitic and Indo-Iranian languages, first unofficially for the purposes of scholars from the West, and later also officially in the creation of Latin-based orthographies for the languages of the Soviet Union in the Latinisation campaign of the 1920s and 1930s. (Latin-based orthographies for especially African languages, interestingly, are often rather IPA-influenced, apparently because they are more recent creations.) I have the idea that precursors of the notation arose at the German-Russian interface and were exported by scholars (often schooled in German-speaking universities of Central Europe) who immigrated into the US.
Perhaps you could say that APA has its origin in German-speaking Europe, while IPA originated in England at the same time – in the late 19th century. APA is therefore closely connected with the philological tradition, whose data-based approach has been carried over into West Coast linguistics with its descriptive focus, while IPA is more closely associated with the East Coast, looking to England for influence rather than Central Europe. Yeah, I know, linguistics is like hip-hop ... it's a divide that even recalls US politics: empiricism-based vs. theory-based, or reality/fact-based vs. faith-based linguistics if you will; though to be fair, Chomsky is everything but a GOP sympathiser and speech science, like most of applied/experimental linguistics probably, despite a historical connection with theoretical/generative linguistics departments at least in Germany, does not just pretend to be science-y, even if it may well be true that they traditionally tend towards a prescriptive, or perhaps rather standard-language-oriented, approach.
The connections are suggestive to me, but I'm unsure how close this is to the truth. Anyone know the history in more detail?
A related issue, the relationship between the APA and the UPA, should be made explicit. The article currently claims that the APA is used for Uralic languages although there is the Uralic phonetic alphabet, which is similar but considered distinct and also has its own article. Perhaps you could claim, along the lines of what I have just written, that APA and UPA only really became distinct entities in the course of the 20th century, and previously they simply were part of a single pool (at least in the minds of academics). --Florian Blaschke (talk) 00:18, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: If there was any Central Europe - "Americanist" connection, it was presumably mediated by Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, but it was probably motivated more by a desire for typewriter / printing practicality than any conscious decision to faithfully reflect Slavic orthographies... AnonMoos (talk) 14:35, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: True. I just thought about this as well reading the section above titled "Anecdote moved from article". Unlike many commonly used IPA symbols, most commonly used APA symbols are also used in relatively common written languages such as Czech and Polish (as mentioned above), meaning they're easier to handle especially (but not only) when using typewriters (even if it means you have to add the diacritics manually), or for typesetters. Of course, since the introduction of Unicode, this problem has gradually diminished. Still, entering IPA on a computer is often still quite cumbersome, more so even than entering characters with diacritics as in Czech, Polish etc. Personally, I'm used to both and can see the merits and appeal of APA as well as IPA. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 20:56, 5 July 2014 (UTC)

text: Setälä's 1901 treatise on the transcription of Finno-Ugric languages, which introduces what became known as the UPA, goes into some considerable detail on the history of his system, and among others mentions the Lepsius Standard Alphabet (1849, 1854, 1855, 1863) as an important predecessor – the 1855 and 1863 versions also get a short mention in this article. On the other hand, the IPA ultimately descends from the English Phonotypic Alphabet (1845) and the Palaeotype alphabet (1869), though that one was also influenced by the Lepsius Standard Alphabet. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 21:19, 2 October 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: There's also the Africa Alphabet, which is basically the IPA with the symbol "j" 'not representing the sound [j] (something which English-speakers often dislike about the IPA)... AnonMoos (talk) 23:15, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: Though it also has the symbol ⟨j⟩ representing [d͡ʒ] (and I wonder how it represents the rounded front vowel [y]), which is illogical (or at least inconsistent) as long as [t͡ʃ] isn't treated alike. Which (judging from African reference alphabet) is apparently the case in the Africa Alphabet: it's represented by ⟨c⟩. In fact, both characters can stand for either palatal stops or postalveolar affricates, another significant deviation from the IPA. It would be easier and more consistent to use the IPA symbol ⟨ɟ⟩ instead, then (as long as it is done consistently, using the palatal stop symbols for postalveolar affricates in broad, phonemic transcription, while a bit of a hack, is acceptable in my book whenever there's no contrast in a language). Or, of course, you could do the UPA/APA thing and use ⟨c⟩ for IPA [t͡s], ⟨j⟩ or ⟨ʒ⟩ for IPA [d͡z], ⟨č⟩ for IPA [t͡ʃ] and ⟨ǰ⟩ or ⟨ǯ⟩ for IPA [d͡ʒ]. --Florian Blaschke (talk) 17:56, 23 November 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Origin and relationship with UPA 

message: The Anthropos alphabet is not an Americanist phonetic notation and doesn’t belong in this article. It really should be in its own article. --Moyogo/ (talk) 08:09, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
replies: text: The relevant sections have been moved to Anthropos phonetic alphabet. --Moyogo/ (talk) 04:02, 17 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move Anthropos alphabet