Response to Martin Ball & Joan Rahilly, ‘The symbolization of central approximants in the IPA’,JIPA41 (2011), 231–237

Abstract

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., [ʋ] (labiodental), [ɹ] (apico-postalveolar) and [ɻ] (retroflex), while, at the same time, avoiding having to add the lowered diacritic to the voiced fricative symbols [β ðzʒ ʁ ʕ].