Response to Martin Ball & Joan Rahilly , ‘ The symbolization of central approximants in the IPA ’ , JIPA 41 ( 2011 ) , 231 – 237 Daniel Recasens

In the paper ‘The symbolization of central approximants in the IPA’, Martin Ball and Joan Rahilly approach an interesting problem – the phonetic transcription of approximants other than the so-called semivowels. In the absence of special symbols in the IPA chart, they suggest that special characters should be used for the notation of approximant realizations made at the bilabial, dental, alveolar, lamino-postalveolar, palatal, velar, uvular and pharyngeal places of articulation. In their view, the introduction of new symbols should render those sounds comparable to other non-semivowel approximants for which special symbols are available, i.e., [V] (labiodental), [®] (apico-postalveolar) and [” ] (retroflex), while, at the same time, avoiding having to add the lowered diacritic to the voiced fricative symbols [β ð z Z “ ÷]. My position regarding this issue is that there is no real need for creating special symbols in order to represent non-semivowel approximants and, therefore, that the addition of a lowered diacritic to the base phonetic symbol is to be preferred. This opinion is grounded in general as well as more specific considerations. As for the former, it should be recalled that the term ‘approximant’ refers to consonant realizations which require a lesser degree of constriction than consonants of other manners of articulation and show no turbulent airstream. Approximants are also generally shorter than other consonants though a short duration does not seem to be an inherent characteristic of this consonant class since geminate glides and frictionless continuants may occur phonologically in the world’s languages (Maddieson 2008). From both the synchronic and the diachronic perspectives, non-semivowel approximants may be related to several manners of articulation such as stops, fricatives and rhotics, and not just fricatives. In fact, this one-to-many relationship appears to be crucial for avoiding the creation of special phonetic symbols since diacritics may be used instead in a fairly economical fashion, i.e. the lowered diacritic may be appended to a large number of symbols to indicate the same approximant characteristic (cf. ‘diacritics may be employed to create symbols for phonemes, thus reducing the need to create new letter shapes’ (IPA 1999: 27)). Moreover, adding a diacritic rather than creating a new symbol is very much in line with the fact that the transition from any of the basic manners of articulation to their approximant cognates proceeds gradually, such that variations in constriction degree induced by several factors (context, position, speech rate, prosodic conditions) may cause a change in manner class to occur. A good example is that of Spanish and Catalan, where the phonemes /b d g/ may show more or less often a fricative realization in contextual environments where they are predicted to surface as approximant allophones (e.g. after a heterosyllabic fricative).