seeking advice

[roger wright]

----------------------------Original message----------------------------


There's another reform which I would love historical linguistics handbooks
to undertake in this respect, but nobody ever has; when presenting
lexical items that have undergone sound changes in the past,
couldn't we use IPA then rather than the orthographical forms?

I mean this: textbooks on Romance historical linguistics, for example,
will tell us that e.g. (in Spanish) LUPUM > lobo (usually in Italics);
but although there has indeed been an orthographical change, the
phonetic change is the one we're interested in, so why not write
"[lupum] > [lobo]?
                                RW