Subject: Re: [Ltru] Re: IPA as a script

From: "Randy Presuhn" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2006 13:21:09 -0800

Hi -

As a technical contributor...

> From: "John Cowan" <[email-masked]>
> To: "Doug Ewell" <[email-masked]>
> Cc: <[email-masked]>
> Sent: Tuesday, October 31, 2006 4:00 PM
> Subject: Re: [Ltru] Re: IPA as a script
...
> > 1b.  Roughly how many scripts have phonetic transcription systems based 
> > on them that need encoding?
> 
> About one in common use; who knows how many individual oddities.
...

I think we need to make a careful distinction here between
"phonetic transcription systems" and the scripts used to
write them.  I don't know of any phonetic transcription
system that is used with more than a single set of symbols;
be identifying a transcription system you've identified the script.
(In this regard a transcription system is rather like an orthography.)

The only such script I would worry about is IPA.

However, one can't make terribly useful inferences in the other
direction.  For example, knowing that something uses IPA to
transcribe English will only give a general idea what symbols
*might* be used to transcribe the "t" phoneme.

Consequently, as soon as one has narrowed the search space
to transcriptions of a language, the next interesting level is
identifying the transcription system, rather than the script.
However, I think we need to be realistic that there's a lot of stuff
that we can recognize as being an IPA-based transcription,
but more narrowly identifying the transcription system may not be
practical for cataloguers.

Randy

_______________________________________________
Ltru mailing list
[email-masked]
https://www1.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ltru

---

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2006 17:09:54 -0500

> (In this regard a transcription system is rather like an orthography.)

Granted, but my point was that IPA and its friendly competitors
(Americanist, UPA, LMA) use a subset of the Latin-script characters, and
as such Latin is the only script generally used for phonetic transcription
purposes (leaving out the novel, the idiosyncratic, and so on).

> The only such script I would worry about is IPA.

That strongly depends on which tradition of descriptive linguistics
you belong to, which strongly depends on what language varieties you
study.  I wish it weren't so and everyone used IPA, but they don't.

> practical for cataloguers.

Indeed.

-- 
Barry gules and argent of seven and six,        John Cowan
on a canton azure fifty molets of the second.   [email-masked]
        --blazoning the U.S. flag               http://www.ccil.org/~cowan

---

From: Peter Constable <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 1 Nov 2006 14:30:41 -0800

Indeed, having worked on character encoding for systems of phonetic
transcription in recent years, I know that there is more than just IPA
in use out there. 

Peter

-----Original Message-----
From: John Cowan [mailto:[email-masked]]