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History It is often useful to compare the Americanist tradition with another widespread tradition, of existing orthographies. This was seen as more practical and more cost-efficient, as many of the characters chosen already existed in Greek and East European orthographies. Abercrombie (1991:44-45) recounts the following concerning the Americanist tradition: In America phonetic notation has had a curious history. Bloomfield used IPA notation in his early book ''An Introduction to the Study of Language'', 1914, and in the English edition of his more famous ''Language'', 1935. But since then, a strange hostility has been shown by many American linguists to IPA notation, especially to certain of its symbols. An interesting and significant story was once told by Carl Voegelin during a symposium held in New York in 1952 on the present state of anthropology. He told how, at the beginning of the 1930s, he was being taught phonetics by, as he put it, a "pleasant Dane", who made him use the IPA symbol for ''sh'' in ''ship'', among others. Some while later he used those symbols in some work on an American Indian language he had done for Sapir. When Sapir saw the work he "simply blew up", Voegelin said, and demanded that in future Voegelin should use ‘s wedge’ (as š was called), instead of the IPA symbol. I have no doubt that the "pleasant Dane" was H. J. Uldall, one of Jones's most brilliant students, who was later to become one of the founders of Glossematics , with Louis Hjelmslev. Uldall did a great deal of research into Californian languages, epecially into Maidu or Nisenan. Most of the texts he collected were not published during his lifetime. It is ironic that when they were published, posthumously, by the University of California Press, the texts were "reorthographised", as the editor's introduction put it: the IPA symbols Uldall had used were removed and replaced by others. What is strange is that the IPA symbols seem so obviously preferable to the Americanist alternatives, the ‘long s’ to the ‘s wedge’, for example. As Jones often pointed out, in connected texts, for the sake of legibility diacritics should be avoided as far as possible. Many Americanist texts give the impression of being overloaded with diacritics. One may wonder why there should be such a hostility in America to IPA notation. I venture to suggest a reason for this apparently irrational attitude. The hostility derives ultimately from the existence, in most American universities, of Speech Departments, which we do not have in Britain. Speech Departments tend to be well-endowed, large, and powerful. In linguistic and phonetic matters they have a reputation for being predominantly prescriptive, and tend to be considered by some therefore to be not very scholarly. In their publications and periodicals the notation they use, when writing of pronunciation, is that of the IPA. My belief is that the last thing a member of an American Linguistics Department wants is to be mistaken for a member of a Speech Department; but if he were to use IPA notation in his writings he would certainly lay himself open to the suspicion that he was. Alphabet Consonants Below is a generalized chart of phonetic symbols used by linguists of the Americanist tradition for transcribing Consonant sounds. Notes: Rhotics table Most languages only have one phonemic Rhotic Consonant (only about 18% of the world's languages have more than one rhotic). As a result, rhotic consonants are generally transcribed with the < r > character. This usage is common practice in Americanist and also other notational traditions (such as the IPA). This lack of detail, although economical and phonologically sound, requires a more careful reading of a given language's phonological description to determine the precise phonetics. A list of rhotics is given below. Alternate symbols There are many alternate symbols seen in Americanist transcription. Below are some equivalent symbols matched with the symbols shown in the consonant chart above. Vocalics Vowel s and Glides . Notes:
Diacritics secondary articulations... Historical charts of 1916 The following chart appeared in American Anthropological Society (1916). Notes:
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