On Sat, 16 Aug 2003 12:12:06 +0000, Richard Wordingham
<richard.wordingham@...> wrote:

>It doesn't. The symbol is 'M\', extended SAMPA for the velar
>frictionless continuant.

OK, so that's a [w] without lip-rounding.

>I wanted to get comments on whether
>people saw [3] as a half-open or mid - the IPA seems to have
>redefined it. They've definitely redefined [8] (o with a horizontal
>line through it, to confuse those who can't write thetas) from mid
>(1979) to half-open (by 1993).

You mean half-close (you must be an optimist).

The early versions of IPA only had three schwa-like symbols:
[&] central (schwa) mid unrounded
[8] central mid rounded
[3] central half-open unrounded (centralized [E]).

In the 1993 chart, we have:

central
half-close [&*] [8]
mid [&]
half-open [3] [3*]

(&* being reversed e, 3* closed 3). The note to the vowel chart says:
"Where symbols appear in pairs, the one to the right represents a rounded
vowel"). This means that schwa has been changed from "mid unrounded" to
"mid". [8] has been changed from "mid rounded" to "half-close rounded", to
match the new symbol [&*], while its old position has been usurped by [&].

In (phonological) practice, this means that you can now use /&/ to denote
any mid-central vowel, even if its main allophone is rounded (French,
Dutch). The other symbols need only be used if there is more than one
mid-central vowel (for instance a more open vs. a more closed one /&*/ ~
/3/, or a rounded vs. an unrounded one /&*/ ~ /8/).

=======================
Miguel Carrasquer Vidal
mcv@...