Re: Ambiguous 'N' (was: dive)

> > > Every halfway standardized ASCII-IPA variant I'm aware of
> > > (SAMPA and Kirshenbaum, most importantly) uses capital N for
> > > the velar nasal and a tilde for nasalization.
> >
> > In Torsten's defence, I've seen 'N' used alongside IPA characters
> > to indicate a nasalisation phoneme. And among ASCII notations,
> > we have the Kyoto-Harvard notation where N is the cerebral nasal
> > and G is the velar nasal.

Aha, that appears to be one of the innumerable parochial partial ASCIIfications. There's no shortage of those.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard-Kyoto
(Ugh, capitals for long/tense vowels.)

> Thanks, Richard.
>
> Actually I believe I picked it up from Piotr. IIRC the thing about it that appealed to me was that that way superscripts were consistently represented by capitals, making the notation easier to memorize.

Yes, I did pick that up fairly fast too. What tripped me here is that nasalization however isn't usually signified by a superscript 'n'.

> And if the N should be mistaken for the velar nasal, the damage is usually not great, since the distance of vowel + nasal velar to nasal vowel isn't large.

Except here it gave an impression *ŋ > *w/*γ where one of *ã > *aw/*aγ was intended.

> I use /n,/ for velar nasal.

Check.

> In general on cybalist /&/ is used for schwa instead of the at-sign, since it made the yahoo groups reader act up (it thought it was an e-mail address).
>
> Torsten

I've not seen that behavior in general, only when there's a period after the @:
notan@...
thoughtan@...

For the record, while mostly abiding to X-SAMPA, I use "&" for [æ] (as in TRAP).

John Vertical