Subject: ipa vs americanist symbols

i am at last drawn to reply to the debate on ipa versus ' americanist ' traditions in phonetic transcription . i was , frankly , somewhat surprised by the tone of the original submission , suggesting that the ipa 's refusal to use hachek / wedge symbols for palatoalveolars was an example of racism ( both anti - americanism and anti-slavicism , and no doubt anti - diacriticism ) . now we learn that the ipa itself is an anti-democratic conspiracy , and we need a new campaign led by american organisations to make phonetic transcription 's afe for democracy , apple pie , and the american way ' ! ? a couple of points need to made in this regard , i think . first , it is not true that the ipa is not used in north america . what we have here is maybe not euro - centrism , but phonology / dialectology centrism ! clinical phoneticians and speech pathologists in north american nearly always use the ipa ( yes : long esses / zees , jods , and the cardinal vowel system , and all ! ) indeed , some departments of linguistics / phonetics operate within the ipa tradition ( e . g . university of victoria bc ) . on the other hand , virtually all phonologists on this side of the atlantic use the so-called americanist symbols . the divide , therefore , is not as has been portrayed . if phonologists tend to use one set of symbols , and phoneticians another , is that really such a problem , as often they are concerned with different levels of description anyway ? even if phoneticians cannot agree , is this also such a problem ? can raising the fears of racial discrimination and undemocratic conspiracies really be justified over relatively trivial distinctions in symbols that anyone trained in the area knows about anyway ? the second point concerns the debate on the symbols themselves . as i have just noted , the difference between certain symbols is surely not a fundamentally important one ; but i would like to speak in defence of the ipa non-hachek versions . leaving aside the fact that these symbols do have a long history , i ( do ) feel that a unit symbol is preferably than a composite one . ( unlike the original posting , it always seemed obvious to me that the hachek symbols were s / z etc plus a diacritic ) . granted that the ipa is not always consistent on this point , a unitary symbol approach avoids confusions as to the nature of the s - s distinction . one may have to counter students ' feelings that [ s ] is really only a type of [ s ] which is reinforced by the spelling ; it does n't help if the symbol looks also like a 's ort of s ' . we might also look at the difference with [ j ] versus [ y ] for the palatal approximant . on the surface , this looks fine , as the [ y ] spelling is familiar ( but surely anglocentric , and not in line with slavic / germanic etc usage ? ) . however , this choice then leaves us with a problem for a high front rounded vowel . if we can't use [ y ] then we must resort to [ u " ] . the diacritic [ " ] , however , is also commonly used in many traditions to stand for centralized . this transcription also suggests that [ u " ] is a variety of [ u ] , and that [ o " ] is a variety of [ o ] etc . the use of independent symbols leaves open the relationship between lip-rounding and tongue position , which the 'd iaresis ' versions do not . however phonetic transcription develops in the future , let 's avoid throwing around accusations at other users or bodies . utopian schemes of universal orthodoxy in this area are surely unneccessary if not unsound . to be realistic , most ipa users ( wherever they ' re based ) are unlikely to surrender over a century 's worth of patterns of usage , and non - ipa users will be equally keen to keep to their symbolizations . let 's learn to live with this , and spend instead time on refining transcription systems ( e . g . for the transcription of atypical speech found in speech pathology clinics ) . perhaps , vive la difference is the motto to aspire to ! martin j . ball university of ulster
