User talk:Cassowary/Uralic phonetic alphabet

The content here is currently based on Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, Finno-Ugric transcription, Re: Questions about Hungarian, by Racsko Tamas to the CONLANG mailing list, and Uralic Phonetic Alphabet characters for the UCS.

Copyedit comments

Hi Cassowary - congrats, some very nice work done here. Hope you don't mind,

Of course I don’t, I thought I made it very clear any and all help was welcome :)

but as per your invitation over at Talk:WikiProject Writing systems I've taken the liberty to copyedit your draft and make some amendments/suggestions for your consideration. As I've only passing familiarity with UPA, I've not really reviewed the detail of your representation of UPA itself but rather have just reviewed your introductory and explanatory text. A couple of other comments:

• where you say "the UPA is used to denote the functional categories of a language at the same time as their phonetic quality", it is not clear to me what is meant. You may need to explain further what "functional categories of a language" are, and how UPA represents them whilst IPA does not.

Indeed, that is rather funny... It's almost word-for-word from one of the sources, and I think I understand what it means (there was an example provided, something like Hungarian aa vs a compared with /aː/ vs /ɔ/), but I want to confirm that with someone before I make the changes.

• it would be helpful to provide some examples of UPA transcription of Finno-Ugric words to show how the system works. It would also be useful to provide a few side-by-side comparisions of some standard English words (perhaps in RP?) transcribed into UPA, and then IPA, so the differences can be seen.

I certainly have plans for that; I was planning on doing it in Australian English though. I'm more familiar with it, and I think that with its non-back rounded vowels and distinctions based solely on length, it's probably more suited to the UPA than RP is.

• some instructions or pointers to the reader on how to go about augmenting their browser fonts so the chars display might help - I think there is even an article out there somewhere about this, but I can't recall it at the moment.

Otherwise, this is coming along just fine and already is a great improvement on the existing article - well done! Cheers, --cjllw | TALK 01:51, 2005 September 7 (UTC)

Ah yes, I do mention Code2000 in the text, but I think some other people have missed it, so I mean to make that clearer.

Thanks for your help!

—Felix the Cassowary (ɑe hɪː jɐ) 03:23, 7 September 2005 (UTC)