The IPA does not have agreed symbols for some laterals. This is hardly surprising considering the relative infrequency of the contrasts involved. The majority of languages either have no contrasts involving laterals, or have at the most one lateral. A few languages, however, have two, three, or even four lateral approximants that contrast simply in place of articulation. Contrasts among trills are even more uncommon than among laterals. Most languages do not trill any articulator. Only a handful of languages have contrasts between trills made at different places. This note will present data on some unusual contrasts involving laterals and trills.

1. Several of the standard works on English pronunciation speak of exceptional cases of lengthening of ‘short’ vowels, and of [æ] in particular:

‘In the South of England a fully long æː is generally used in the adjectives ending in -ad (bad bæːd, sad sæːd, etc.), and is quite common in some nouns, e.g. man mæːn or mæn, bag bæːg or bæg, jam dʒæːm or dʒæm. … the words back, that (meaning ‘that thing’) at the end of a sentence are often pronounced with long æː by some Southern English people.’ (Jones 1960: 235.) ‘This traditionally short vowel appears to be lengthened in RP especially before the lenis consonants /b, d, g, dʒ, m, n/ (cab, bad, bag, badge, jam, man).’ (Gimson 1962: 100.)

In ‘The undesirability of length marks in EFL phonemic transcription’ (1975) J. Windsor Lewis advanced a number of arguments to demonstrate why the colon was undesirable as a notational device for use in EFL phonemic transcriptions. I will try to review the case systematically and draw attention to certain facts before an ANTI-COLON attitude becomes more widespread and irremediably fixed. To introduce some method into the treatment and to separate the issues clearly from one another, I will consider the question from five different aspects and in this order: (1) phonological, (2) phonetic, (3) typographical, (4) pedagogic, and (5) practical.

The purpose of the investigation was to discover whether there might be a connection between success in imitating short utterances and the meaningfulness of the utterance to the imitators.

A few months after his father's death in 1879 Henry Sweet moved from the family home, 140 Maida Vale, London, into lodgings at Mansfield Cottage in Hampstead where ‘the air … [was] very fine’ and where he could ‘get out into a very fine country in a few minutes’ (letter to Johan Storm of 27 November 1879). He was to remain there until his marriage in 1887. But for anyone interested in finding the Cottage today there is a problem since no building with this name exists now in Hampstead (there is however a Mansfield Place and a Mansfield Road). When Sweet wrote to Storm some years later on the occasion of a visit Storm was paying to England, he gave him instructions on how to reach Mansfield Cottage—‘… it is tolerably accessible from Woburn Place. There is an omnibus from Tottenham Court Road …’—and to help him find it drew a sketch-map (letter of 18 April 1884).

In 1913 Le Maître Phonétique published the first ever phonetic text of Neo-Aramaic (Neo-Syriac) in IPA. It was contributed by Osipov (Osipoff) who, according to Jones (1950), was a remarkable linguist and phonetician. The text had, however, been the cause of a dispute between Jones and Passy. The latter had reacted so strongly to Osipov' phonetic representation of the feature of aspiration that he described the language (i.e. Syriac) as ‘Langue excentrique’ (Passy, 1913). According to Polotsky (1961) ‘this epithet refers to the bewildering abundance of aspiration marks in Osipov's text and to their occurrence in unexpected surroundings’.