seeking advice

[rankin]

seeking adviceAll,

  Having read the posts and replied once off the top of my head, I have given the matter of transcription a little more thought.  In the interest of promulgating student understanding and not making this a referendum on Britain vs. America's "Place In The World", I would suggest the following.

  Most students taking a course in comparative linguistics will have had an introductory course in linguistics and, one hopes, a course in phonology -- almost certainly at least the former.  Is there any degree of uniformity in the transcription systems in the introductory textbooks that are  most commonly being used today?  How about phonology textbooks?  Use by major journals in the field might be a secondary consideration.  If it turns out that there is a reasonable degree of uniformity in the books students will have already used, then by all means continue it.  If there isn't any such uniformity, then we're no worse off than we were before.

  The other factor I would personally like to see considered is the extent to which a transcription system provides a "feature-like" way of handling segmental transcription.  Examples and problems need to be given in alphabetic notation, but in the study of language change and reconstruction we are often dealing with changes affecting natural classes.  Some symbol usage facilitates seeing the relationship among segments that share places or manners of articulation.  Other symbol sets do not.  This was one of the things in the back of my mind when I mentioned that I liked the letters with haceks to indicate strident palato-alveolars.  The hacek signals something consistently to the student.  I like the various diacritics used by the IPA for specialized articulations (palatalization, retroflexion, laryngealization, etc.) and other systems have similar diacritics.  If only King Seijong had designed the IPA. . . . 

  I have not done the math to see which of the various competing systems or textbooks comes out on top, given the abovementioned criteria, but I hope Lyle will.  I certainly agree that it would be nice to have a standard, and maybe IPA approaches that, but I also think Marc Picard makes a good point regarding relative use and productivity.  I'm just sort of glad Inow that I never wrote that historical linguistics textbook I was thinking about producing a decade or so ago.

  Bob Rankin
  Department of Linguistics
  University of Kansas
  Lawrence, KS 66044 USA

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