Labiodental flap symbol
In case you missed the announcement at SIL or the follow-ups on Linguist List, Tenser, said the Tensor, and languagehat, a new phonetic symbol has been approved by the IPA for the first time in twelve years. It’s the symbol for a labiodental flap, and is referred to as right hook ‘v’. Here’s what it looks like:
Tenser provides this link to a new public beta version of the SILDoulos IPA font, which includes this new symbol (among several other changes, it seems). The second commenter on languagehat’s post provides this link to an article in Linguistic Discovery, which has links to audio and video of the labiodental flap (in Mono, one of several languages with the sound).
I wish some of these folks were in charge of updating the IPA site, which has yet to show any indication that the new symbol is approved; the latest news page is “[u]nder construction”, and the most recent issues of the FONETIKS newsletter don’t have an announcement, despite the fact that the last one was published 10 days after the SIL announcement.
If any phonoloblog readers will be at the LSA Annual Meeting in Albuquerque in January, it might be fun to get together and make a toast to this new symbol. After all, it’s not that often that new symbols get approved, right?
Comment by Adam Ussishkin — November 12, 2005 @ 4:09 pm
Geoff Pullum writes in Language Log today to point to this NYT story on the labiodental flap.
Comment by Eric Bakovic — December 13, 2005 @ 9:45 pm
And read Bill Poser’s follow-up here.
Comment by Eric Bakovic — December 14, 2005 @ 1:40 pm