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From: ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: question about names for symbols (IPA)
Message-ID: <340@spar.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 20-Jun-85 02:37:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: spar.340
Posted: Thu Jun 20 02:37:37 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 23-Jun-85 00:38:33 EDT
References: <2041@iddic.UUCP> <688@sphinx.UChicago.UUCP>
Reply-To: ellis@spar.UUCP (Michael Ellis)
Organization: Schlumberger Palo Alto Research, CA
Lines: 36

>The velar nasal consonant (n with right leg extended like descender of g) is
>often called ENGMA.  The mid-high mid-back vowel ("uh") is CARET, since
>indeed the symbol in other uses is just that.  The Greek letters of course
>inherit their regular names.  The voiced "th" is "crossed d" or "barred d"
>for some people, and thorn for others -- though it's not exactly the
>same as the old thorn character. -- Mitch Marks

    AngloSaxon texts use two symbols interchangeably in the words now
    written `th':

	`thorn': looks like cross between lowercase `p' and `b'
	`eth':	 looks like a barred `d' (`eTH' has the TH in `THe')

    Sometimes modern transcriptions of Anglo-Saxon regularize these so that
    eth is used where we now use a voiced-th (then, that) and thorn
    elsewhere (thin, thatch), as in modern Icelandic, which, I believe, uses
    those same names. IPA discards thorn and uses theta instead.

    Other IPA symbols required for English are `ash', the AngloSaxon
    character for the vowel in `ash', apparently derived from the Latin
    digraph `ae', and `shwa', the upside-down `e' whose name comes from
    Hebrew. These letters all look somewhat as below:
    
     ASH        SHWA       CARAT      ENGMA      ETH        THORN      THETA

                                                  #        ##           ###
                                                 #####      #          #   #
    ### ##       ###        ###      # ###         #        ####       #   #
       #  #         #        #        #   #       ###       #   #      ##### 
     #####       ####       # #       #   #      #   #      #   #      #   # 
    #  #        #   #      #   #      #   #      #   #      #   #      #   # 
     ## ###      ###      ### ###    ###  #       ###       ####        ###  
                                          #                 #
                                       ###                 ###

-michael