Talk:Americanist phonetic notation

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Americanist should not redirect here. The word means ‘a linguist working in the field of the indigenous languages of the Americas’; there should be an article describing the field, perhaps under American languages or Americanist linguisics, and Americanist should redirect there. 89.49.97.70 21:55, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

Nice work! - Mustafaa 21:15, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I am happy that you like. no telling when it will be finished though... nice day to you — ishwar  (SPEAK) 21:47, 2005 Jun 10 (UTC)

[edit] Character Harmony

"Unlike the IPA, Americanist phonetic notation does not require a strict harmony among character styles: letters from the Greek and Roman alphabets are used side-by-side."

I'm not quite sure what's meant by this -- surely "GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA", "GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA", and "GREEK SMALL LETTER CHI" are in the IPA along with "LATIN SMALL LETTER X"? --CRGreathouse 19:23, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

The IPA uses variants of Greek letters, where possible, that fit with Latin better. IPA uses ɸ and ɣ, Americanist uses φ and γ. While in some phonetic transcriptions (I don't know about Americanist) you might see the ϑ variant of theta, it's always θ in IPA. --Ptcamn 20:10, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

I can't imagine a Greek letter looking more out-of-place in Latin text than a beta, but it's used in the IPA symbols. Still, I see your point. Perhaps it would be best to explain some of this in the article? --CRGreathouse 22:23, 10 May 2006 (UTC)

Although Unicode doesn't provide separate symbols for Greek beta and IPA beta, if you look in phonetic publications, IPA beta really does look rather different, more like a Latin letter. It looks pretty much like ß with a longer left leg, which (in serif fonts) has a serif at the bottom and which is straight up-and-down. A Greek beta doesn't have a serif and is slightly tilted to the right. Angr (t • c) 07:10, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Ah. In that case I plead ignorance, and thank you for your patience in dealing with me. I'm glad I posted here instead of editing the article. --CRGreathouse 08:20, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

hi. See also the following from the IPA's 1949 Principles (the earlier handbook):

" (c) The non-roman letters of the International Phonetic Alphabet have been designed as far as possible to harmonise well with the roman letters. The Association does not recognise makeshift letters ; it recognises only letters which have been carefully cut so as to be harmony with the other letters. For instance, the Greek letters included in the International Alphabet are cut in roman adaptations. Thus, since the ordinary shape of the Greek letter β does not harmonize with roman type, in the International Phonetic Alphabet it is given the form β. And of the two form of Greek theta, θ and ϑ, it has been necessary to choose the first (in vertical form), since the second cannot be made to harmonize with roman letters. " (pp. 1-2)

The cited Greek forms above are in the usual slanted style, but Unicode does not provide separate symbols, so I cant reproduce the original precisely here. peace – ishwar  (speak) 16:01, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

G'day. Is there any reason why Unicode encodes a Latin/IPA form of some letters, like gamma and phi and epsilon, but not others, uniting them with the Greek characters? I initially assumed it was because the IPA beta had exactly the same form as a Greek one (not having much familiarity with the latter), but as Angr and the 1949 Principles points out, the glyphs are quite different. Do they have some justification, or do we just guess? —Felix the Cassowary 11:01, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

There's a discussion here, although it doesn't exactly clear up the issue entirely IMO (two serifs beat one? what kind of logic is that?). --Ptcamn 11:17, 13 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Font specification in the tables

The body of the tables shows up in Gentium font in my browser (Safari), and compared to the sans-serif text in Wikipedia it looks small and crabbed, and out of place. Is it not possible to just add class="IPA" or class="Unicode" attribute to the table for this to work in Windows Explorer, and let all the other browsers just do their thing? I'll give that a try; I'm sure someone will let us know if it doesn't work. —Michael Z. 2006-10-24 01:51 Z

[edit] Anecdote moved from article

I was a student of Carl Voegelin's from 1962 to 1975. I never heard him speak of Sapir's attitude, but in the field methods classes he gave us his symbols with the s-wedge and the c-wedge (hachek). I used these in transcribing Mohave at the Arixona field station and in working with Shawnee (my dissertation language). Fred Householder, a classicist, used the same symbols in the Linguistics Department as did the other linguists. I never heard anything disparaging about the IPA nor did I hear anything about the Speech Departments in classes by our professors or by the many linguists who spoke at the Ethnolinguistic Seminar on Monday nights and chatted with us at the Voegelins' home at the wine parties afterwards. I think the tradition began with the work of linguists and anthropologists working out of the Bureau of Indian Affairs where there was, prior to Bloomfield's time (he was a Germanticist), a standardized orthography variations of which were used from the mid-1800s onward by Lewis Henry Morgan and others, and in the 20th century by Frank Speck,Lowie, etc. Our concern was always how to put the symbols on typewriters by making dead keys (for diacritics), adding diacritics for seldom used symbols, and the like. Voegelin once mentioned that he and Mary Haas invented the idea of filing off the period under the question mark to make a glottal stop (which of course looks like the IPA symbol). So I think it is an anthropological and linguistic tradition in America rather than any inherent combat with the IPA. Noel Schutz

—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 61.227.113.120 (talk • contribs) 20:36, 10 February 2007.