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.)

The University Library of Oslo has a collection of letters from Henry Sweet to the Norwegian phonetician Johan Storm written over a period of twenty years from 1876. We here present extracts from the letters, selected with a view to showing Sweet's views on the terms narrow and wide during this period.

A sixteenth-century sound change in Scots has resulted in the appearance in that language of a system of vowel-length variations strikingly different from the common Germanic system still visible in other West Germanic speech forms. The present situation is described by the set of rules known as Aitken's Law (Aitken 1962 and 1977; see also Lass 1974): all vowels and diphthongs are long in stressed open syllables, before voiced fricatives and /r/, and before morpheme boundaries; and short elsewhere; with the two exceptions of /ι/ and /ʌ/ which are invariably short.

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.

It is common knowledge that when one language borrows from another, the borrower often would incorporate the loan words into its phonological system by substituting ‘alien’ sounds by those from its own stock, breaking up consonant clusters to conform to its syllable structure and so on. In general it is not impossible to predict fairly accurately what a loan word would sound like in a language if one is familiar with the phonological systems of the lender and borrower. However, syllable structure and segments are just part of the picture. Other considerations like stress and tone would also be important if one is dealing with a stress language or a tone lauguage. The aim of this paper is to examine English loan forms in Cantonese in order to discover what happens when words from a stress language like English are borrowed into a tone language like Cantonese.

In all the formal descriptions of Haitian Creole published so far the phonemics of the vowels includes only front unrounded and back rounded varieties:

Analysts confronted with the presence in the inventory of the front rounded series attribute to them the status of exceptions or loans.

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’.

I have to confess to being to a degree pained at having it seems touched a nerve of my good friend Julian Pring's in my comments on linking /r/. He suggests that my article on the subject in its zeal to counter long-current false notions of the facts of usage has not escaped some degree of tendentiousness. I should be less than candid if I failed to grant that he has something of a point to make but equally if I let my high regard for him make me withhold the counter-comment that his criticisms strike me as by no means more successful than I was in avoiding tendentiousness in that article. I am at least glad to see that it is only on the sociological status of the so-called ‘intrusive’ /r/ that we are in disagreement.