Re: sibilants

Tristan McLeay skrev:
> David McCann wrote:
>> On Tue, 2008-08-19 at 10:54 -0400, Mark J. Reed wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 12:07 PM, David McCann <david@...> wrote:
>>>> I don't care about all this #!*$ CXS stuff,
>>> Oookay.  I don't think the tone is necessary.  CXS may seem
>>> superfluous to you, but it does have the advantage of being easy to
>>> type, even for those of us who rarely have cause to enter IPA symbols
>>> outside of email to this very list...
>> My distaste for CXS and the like was not intended as a reflection in its
>> users (we're *nice* people on this list!); it just reflects my inability
>> to remember it and my utter bafflement as to why people are still using
>> it after a decade of Unicode and configurable keyboards.
>
> Why are you baffled? People often use computers they don't have enough
> control over to alter the keyboard layout, either because they lack the
> skill, they lack the permission or they lack the time. Until such a time
> as it's a default feature (and keyboard layouts are freely changeable,
> even on restricted machines), people will still need to use CXS or other
> similar systems.
Moreover changing keyboards back and forth is a hassle,
especially if you forget to do it at the right point.
I should know as when I need to type IPA I use a modified
keyboard on Windows and SCIM-KMFL on Ubuntu -- both with
their logic based on CSX as like Henrik I've used that
system for years and find it often more readable than IPA.

Shorthand notations like D\ or δ (or ᴆ if your font can show
it) are convenient and defensible if the CXS for a single
sound becomes five characters long D_-_o or the IPA a
double-stacked subscript diacritic monstrosity like ð̠̞
which most fonts still make a mess of.  If you want
to write a discussion of retracted/mean/advanced and
fricative/approximant variants of [D] (or [z] as
the case may be if you discuss Icelandic) those
hard to read diacritics become hard to read indeed.
I once wrote a paper on Swedish /r/ and /l/ sounds
and quickly ran out of symbols in the more restricted
IPA of the day.  This was back in the days of dot matrix
printers and I had to make my own bitmap fonts for
phonetics.  It was hard enough to create the needed
diacriticized characters in the large sizes used for
'fine' printing those days.  In the small sizes used
for screen display I created my own ad hoc symbols,
some of which like r\` ɻ later became recognized IPA.
It's also from that experience I know how hard it is
to visually distinguish inverted and rotated R...

/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch atte melroch dotte se
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  "C'est en vain que nos Josués littéraires crient
  à la langue de s'arrêter; les langues ni le soleil
  ne s'arrêtent plus. Le jour où elles se *fixent*,
  c'est qu'elles meurent."           (Victor Hugo)