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![]() | Text and/or other creative content from this version of Americanist phonetic notation was copied or moved into Anthropos phonetic alphabet with this edit. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists. |
the original phrasing of the article was "originally developed by European and Euro-American anthropologists and language scientists" which I changed to "originally developed by European and American anthopologists and language scientists". While the original is technically true, American academia at the time was a province almost exculively of people of European descent, did anthropology and language science stand out in their exclusion of minorities? More so than chemistry or medicine or philosophy? To specify Euro-Americans seems to imply they did. If this is in fact true, feel free to change the article back. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.135.193.109 ( talk) 06:59, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
Americanist should not redirect here. The word means ‘a linguist working in the field of the indigenous languages of the Americas’; there should be an article describing the field, perhaps under American languages or Americanist linguisics, and Americanist should redirect there. 89.49.97.70 21:55, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Nice work! -
Mustafaa 21:15, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
"Unlike the IPA, Americanist phonetic notation does not require a strict harmony among character styles: letters from the Greek and Roman alphabets are used side-by-side."
I'm not quite sure what's meant by this -- surely "GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA", "GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA", and "GREEK SMALL LETTER CHI" are in the IPA along with "LATIN SMALL LETTER X"? -- CRGreathouse 19:23, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
The body of the tables shows up in Gentium font in my browser (Safari), and compared to the sans-serif text in Wikipedia it looks small and crabbed, and out of place. Is it not possible to just add class="IPA" or class="Unicode" attribute to the table for this to work in Windows Explorer, and let all the other browsers just do their thing? I'll give that a try; I'm sure someone will let us know if it doesn't work. — Michael Z. 2006-10-24 01:51 Z
I was a student of Carl Voegelin's from 1962 to 1975. I never heard him speak of Sapir's attitude, but in the field methods classes he gave us his symbols with the s-wedge and the c-wedge (hachek). I used these in transcribing Mohave at the Arixona field station and in working with Shawnee (my dissertation language). Fred Householder, a classicist, used the same symbols in the Linguistics Department as did the other linguists. I never heard anything disparaging about the IPA nor did I hear anything about the Speech Departments in classes by our professors or by the many linguists who spoke at the Ethnolinguistic Seminar on Monday nights and chatted with us at the Voegelins' home at the wine parties afterwards. I think the tradition began with the work of linguists and anthropologists working out of the Bureau of Indian Affairs where there was, prior to Bloomfield's time (he was a Germanticist), a standardized orthography variations of which were used from the mid-1800s onward by Lewis Henry Morgan and others, and in the 20th century by Frank Speck,Lowie, etc. Our concern was always how to put the symbols on typewriters by making dead keys (for diacritics), adding diacritics for seldom used symbols, and the like. Voegelin once mentioned that he and Mary Haas invented the idea of filing off the period under the question mark to make a glottal stop (which of course looks like the IPA symbol). So I think it is an anthropological and linguistic tradition in America rather than any inherent combat with the IPA. Noel Schutz
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 61.227.113.120 ( talk • contribs) 20:36, 10 February 2007.
I might be wrong, but I think the "APA symbols guide" that's included in the external links section is an Africanist alphabet, not an Americanist one. See for example the use of "c" for a palatal stop rather than an affricate, the absence of crossed lambda for "tl", and the presence of click symbols. And the fact that it's David Odden's website.
If that link was intended to show an Americanist alphabet, it should probably be removed. If its inclusion was intentional, then we need to at least call it an Africanist symbol guide to avoid confusion from people who will (quite naturally) think that a link to an APA guide on this page must mean an Americanist alphabet. Jiashudiwanjin ( talk) 16:39, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
Ish ishwar reverted an edit for me for no reason. I untagged symbols which are not used the same way in IPA from the article. (They had other symbols in IPA) They were tagged by {{ IPA}}, which made them have that title displayed (Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)) if the cursor stopped on them. -- Mahmudmasri ( talk) 01:02, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
I have sent him a message on his talk page and he ignored it. I'll restore my edit if he continued to ignore me, because he didn't even seem to have read my edit summary nor seen what I changed. -- Mahmudmasri ( talk) 05:56, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
The long quote contains much which seems to be just one person's individual opinions. Many followers of "Americanist" traditions would claim that symbols like "š" have the advantage of being compositional (i.e. their sound value can be predicted from knowing the sound-value of the base letter plus the nature of the phonetic modification expressed by the diacritic symbol), while "ʃ" is just an arbitrarily unanalyzable symbol (and too many arbitrarily unanalyzable symbols become a burden on the memory)... AnonMoos ( talk) 18:08, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
I wonder whether Jones had the same silly, baseless, Anglocentric view of the "illegibility" of Slovak or Hungarian! Linguistatlunch ( talk) 18:29, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
It would be nice to learn more about the origin and early history of the system in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Typical of the APA is the use of characters derived from Latin alphabets adapted to Slavic languages, especially Czech (š, č, ž), but also Polish (ś, ć, ł), and in ways which is identical with or at least closely approximates their use there (also of some simple characters such as c). I've wondered for some time now if there is a connection with the Prague School or an older scholarly tradition in the region, or with the transcription of Cyrillic into Latin, which naturally employed characters borrowed from Czech and Polish; officially in the case of Serbian and Belorussian, unofficially in the case of Russian and Bulgarian. APA could have (at least partly) grown organically out of attempts to convert into Latin characters Cyrillic-based transcriptions of Uralic, Caucasian, Altaic, Siberian, North American, and also Semitic and Indo-Iranian languages, first unofficially for the purposes of scholars from the West, and later also officially in the creation of Latin-based orthographies for the languages of the Soviet Union in the Latinisation campaign of the 1920s and 1930s. (Latin-based orthographies for especially African languages, interestingly, are often rather IPA-influenced, apparently because they are more recent creations.) I have the idea that precursors of the notation arose at the German-Russian interface and were exported by scholars (often schooled in German-speaking universities of Central Europe) who immigrated into the US.
Perhaps you could say that APA has its origin in German-speaking Europe, while IPA originated in England at the same time – in the late 19th century. APA is therefore closely connected with the philological tradition, whose data-based approach has been carried over into West Coast linguistics with its descriptive focus, while IPA is more closely associated with the East Coast, looking to England for influence rather than Central Europe. Yeah, I know, linguistics is like hip-hop ... it's a divide that even recalls US politics: empiricism-based vs. theory-based, or reality/fact-based vs. faith-based linguistics if you will; though to be fair, Chomsky is everything but a GOP sympathiser and speech science, like most of applied/experimental linguistics probably, despite a historical connection with theoretical/generative linguistics departments at least in Germany, does not just pretend to be science-y, even if it may well be true that they traditionally tend towards a prescriptive, or perhaps rather standard-language-oriented, approach.
The connections are suggestive to me, but I'm unsure how close this is to the truth. Anyone know the history in more detail?
A related issue, the relationship between the APA and the UPA, should be made explicit. The article currently claims that the APA is used for Uralic languages although there is the Uralic phonetic alphabet, which is similar but considered distinct and also has its own article. Perhaps you could claim, along the lines of what I have just written, that APA and UPA only really became distinct entities in the course of the 20th century, and previously they simply were part of a single pool (at least in the minds of academics). -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 00:18, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
The Anthropos alphabet is not an Americanist phonetic notation and doesn’t belong in this article. It really should be in its own article. -- Moyogo/ (talk) 08:09, 1 April 2023 (UTC)
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![]() | Text and/or other creative content from this version of Americanist phonetic notation was copied or moved into Anthropos phonetic alphabet with this edit. The former page's history now serves to provide attribution for that content in the latter page, and it must not be deleted as long as the latter page exists. |
the original phrasing of the article was "originally developed by European and Euro-American anthropologists and language scientists" which I changed to "originally developed by European and American anthopologists and language scientists". While the original is technically true, American academia at the time was a province almost exculively of people of European descent, did anthropology and language science stand out in their exclusion of minorities? More so than chemistry or medicine or philosophy? To specify Euro-Americans seems to imply they did. If this is in fact true, feel free to change the article back. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 128.135.193.109 ( talk) 06:59, 19 January 2009 (UTC)
Americanist should not redirect here. The word means ‘a linguist working in the field of the indigenous languages of the Americas’; there should be an article describing the field, perhaps under American languages or Americanist linguisics, and Americanist should redirect there. 89.49.97.70 21:55, 27 September 2007 (UTC)
Nice work! -
Mustafaa 21:15, 10 Jun 2005 (UTC)
"Unlike the IPA, Americanist phonetic notation does not require a strict harmony among character styles: letters from the Greek and Roman alphabets are used side-by-side."
I'm not quite sure what's meant by this -- surely "GREEK SMALL LETTER BETA", "GREEK SMALL LETTER THETA", and "GREEK SMALL LETTER CHI" are in the IPA along with "LATIN SMALL LETTER X"? -- CRGreathouse 19:23, 10 May 2006 (UTC)
The body of the tables shows up in Gentium font in my browser (Safari), and compared to the sans-serif text in Wikipedia it looks small and crabbed, and out of place. Is it not possible to just add class="IPA" or class="Unicode" attribute to the table for this to work in Windows Explorer, and let all the other browsers just do their thing? I'll give that a try; I'm sure someone will let us know if it doesn't work. — Michael Z. 2006-10-24 01:51 Z
I was a student of Carl Voegelin's from 1962 to 1975. I never heard him speak of Sapir's attitude, but in the field methods classes he gave us his symbols with the s-wedge and the c-wedge (hachek). I used these in transcribing Mohave at the Arixona field station and in working with Shawnee (my dissertation language). Fred Householder, a classicist, used the same symbols in the Linguistics Department as did the other linguists. I never heard anything disparaging about the IPA nor did I hear anything about the Speech Departments in classes by our professors or by the many linguists who spoke at the Ethnolinguistic Seminar on Monday nights and chatted with us at the Voegelins' home at the wine parties afterwards. I think the tradition began with the work of linguists and anthropologists working out of the Bureau of Indian Affairs where there was, prior to Bloomfield's time (he was a Germanticist), a standardized orthography variations of which were used from the mid-1800s onward by Lewis Henry Morgan and others, and in the 20th century by Frank Speck,Lowie, etc. Our concern was always how to put the symbols on typewriters by making dead keys (for diacritics), adding diacritics for seldom used symbols, and the like. Voegelin once mentioned that he and Mary Haas invented the idea of filing off the period under the question mark to make a glottal stop (which of course looks like the IPA symbol). So I think it is an anthropological and linguistic tradition in America rather than any inherent combat with the IPA. Noel Schutz
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 61.227.113.120 ( talk • contribs) 20:36, 10 February 2007.
I might be wrong, but I think the "APA symbols guide" that's included in the external links section is an Africanist alphabet, not an Americanist one. See for example the use of "c" for a palatal stop rather than an affricate, the absence of crossed lambda for "tl", and the presence of click symbols. And the fact that it's David Odden's website.
If that link was intended to show an Americanist alphabet, it should probably be removed. If its inclusion was intentional, then we need to at least call it an Africanist symbol guide to avoid confusion from people who will (quite naturally) think that a link to an APA guide on this page must mean an Americanist alphabet. Jiashudiwanjin ( talk) 16:39, 4 September 2009 (UTC)
Ish ishwar reverted an edit for me for no reason. I untagged symbols which are not used the same way in IPA from the article. (They had other symbols in IPA) They were tagged by {{ IPA}}, which made them have that title displayed (Representation in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)) if the cursor stopped on them. -- Mahmudmasri ( talk) 01:02, 15 December 2010 (UTC)
I have sent him a message on his talk page and he ignored it. I'll restore my edit if he continued to ignore me, because he didn't even seem to have read my edit summary nor seen what I changed. -- Mahmudmasri ( talk) 05:56, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
The long quote contains much which seems to be just one person's individual opinions. Many followers of "Americanist" traditions would claim that symbols like "š" have the advantage of being compositional (i.e. their sound value can be predicted from knowing the sound-value of the base letter plus the nature of the phonetic modification expressed by the diacritic symbol), while "ʃ" is just an arbitrarily unanalyzable symbol (and too many arbitrarily unanalyzable symbols become a burden on the memory)... AnonMoos ( talk) 18:08, 11 March 2012 (UTC)
I wonder whether Jones had the same silly, baseless, Anglocentric view of the "illegibility" of Slovak or Hungarian! Linguistatlunch ( talk) 18:29, 6 September 2020 (UTC)
It would be nice to learn more about the origin and early history of the system in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Typical of the APA is the use of characters derived from Latin alphabets adapted to Slavic languages, especially Czech (š, č, ž), but also Polish (ś, ć, ł), and in ways which is identical with or at least closely approximates their use there (also of some simple characters such as c). I've wondered for some time now if there is a connection with the Prague School or an older scholarly tradition in the region, or with the transcription of Cyrillic into Latin, which naturally employed characters borrowed from Czech and Polish; officially in the case of Serbian and Belorussian, unofficially in the case of Russian and Bulgarian. APA could have (at least partly) grown organically out of attempts to convert into Latin characters Cyrillic-based transcriptions of Uralic, Caucasian, Altaic, Siberian, North American, and also Semitic and Indo-Iranian languages, first unofficially for the purposes of scholars from the West, and later also officially in the creation of Latin-based orthographies for the languages of the Soviet Union in the Latinisation campaign of the 1920s and 1930s. (Latin-based orthographies for especially African languages, interestingly, are often rather IPA-influenced, apparently because they are more recent creations.) I have the idea that precursors of the notation arose at the German-Russian interface and were exported by scholars (often schooled in German-speaking universities of Central Europe) who immigrated into the US.
Perhaps you could say that APA has its origin in German-speaking Europe, while IPA originated in England at the same time – in the late 19th century. APA is therefore closely connected with the philological tradition, whose data-based approach has been carried over into West Coast linguistics with its descriptive focus, while IPA is more closely associated with the East Coast, looking to England for influence rather than Central Europe. Yeah, I know, linguistics is like hip-hop ... it's a divide that even recalls US politics: empiricism-based vs. theory-based, or reality/fact-based vs. faith-based linguistics if you will; though to be fair, Chomsky is everything but a GOP sympathiser and speech science, like most of applied/experimental linguistics probably, despite a historical connection with theoretical/generative linguistics departments at least in Germany, does not just pretend to be science-y, even if it may well be true that they traditionally tend towards a prescriptive, or perhaps rather standard-language-oriented, approach.
The connections are suggestive to me, but I'm unsure how close this is to the truth. Anyone know the history in more detail?
A related issue, the relationship between the APA and the UPA, should be made explicit. The article currently claims that the APA is used for Uralic languages although there is the Uralic phonetic alphabet, which is similar but considered distinct and also has its own article. Perhaps you could claim, along the lines of what I have just written, that APA and UPA only really became distinct entities in the course of the 20th century, and previously they simply were part of a single pool (at least in the minds of academics). -- Florian Blaschke ( talk) 00:18, 5 January 2013 (UTC)
The Anthropos alphabet is not an Americanist phonetic notation and doesn’t belong in this article. It really should be in its own article. -- Moyogo/ (talk) 08:09, 1 April 2023 (UTC)