Talk:History of the IPA

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Why is the 1900 year table in French? - 81.15.146.91 22:34, 21 December 2005 (UTC)

hi. that is the language it was published in. – ishwar  (speak) 04:25, 22 December 2005 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] Dictionaries

I've written a bit about the history of IPA's use in dictionaries, at Pronunciation respelling for English, with a couple of online references. Might be useful for this article. Cheers. —Michael Z. 2006-08-17 08:01 Z

[edit] Near-close vowels

The charts uniformly give /ɪ, ʊ/ as the symbols for the near-close vowels. I'm pretty sure they were officially /ɩ, ɷ/ before 1989. This is confirmed also by Obsolete and nonstandard symbols in the IPA, so I'm changing it accordingly. User:Angr 19:00, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, they were, I have a resource that shows the old forms in the 1949 version of the IPA. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 20:00, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Unrounded o

Another thing that's changed in the IPA is the symbol for the close-mid back unrounded vowel. The symbol used to be "baby gamma", with a flat top, which looked exactly like ɣ except without a descender. At some point (1989? 1993?) it was changed to "ram's horns", with a rounded top. The problem with showing this is that Unicode doesn't have separate characters for these: U+0264 LATIN SMALL LETTER RAMS HORN ɤ can, despite its name, be either "baby gamma" or "ram's horns" depending on the font. User:Angr 19:29, 26 August 2006 (UTC)

Well, the article close-mid back unrounded vowel uses actual images to distinguish the two. We could do that, but it may be easier to just create a link to close-mid back unrounded vowel. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 01:40, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Aims and goals

Where did the "Formation of Aims and Goals" section come from? It seems to be uncited. Would it be reasonable to assume that it comes from the 1888 article by Paul Passy, cited in the bibliography? --Siva 00:32, 2 March 2007 (UTC)

I haven't looked at that section yet, but I would bet either Principles or Handbook would cover it. --Kjoonlee 16:57, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] History unclear

Hi, I think it would be better to use a more chronological format, kind of like a changelog. The 1989 section mentions what changed with the 1993 version; this can be confusing, IMHO. --Kjoonlee 15:32, 17 May 2007 (UTC)

I was thinking I would have to get Pullum's Phonetic Symbol Guide to polish up this article, but Handbook seems to cover a lot of the history (at least indirectly) in the appendices. I'll see what I can do... --Kjoonlee 16:56, 6 September 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Foundation of IPA: Places of articulation as alphabet

The ancient Tamil Grammar Tolkappiyam defines alphabet as the names of the places of articulation. Each place of articulation can produce a number of phonemes. The foundation for IPA is this principle of "Places of artiulation". One of the major functions of IPA is to identify, decribe and represent all of the possible phonemes under the title "Phonetic Alphabet". Sisrivas (talk) 11:42, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] First work to use apply IPA throughout

I would have thought that A Grammar of the Dialect of Windhill in 1893 by Joseph Wright would be a contender for this title? Does anyone know of other early linguistic works that made practical use of IPA? Epa101 (talk) 21:19, 16 April 2008 (UTC)