There’s a new symbol (a hooked v for a labiodental flap) that’s made its way into the IPA. And, in the course of writing about it, Bill Poser over at Language Log brought up the Bronx cheer and the IPA symbol used for it. I, for one, am not convinced that a Bronx cheer (aka a raspberry) is a bilabial trill (IPA /ʙ/). For me, the tongue is placed between the lips, and trilling takes place between the bottom lip and the tongue. (I don’t know, maybe it’s a dialectal difference.) There is another sound, usually of contempt ( and which Homer on The Simpsons makes quite often), that is a sort of relaxed bilabial trill, which is also used to imitate a snorting horse.
Zackary Sholem Berger has translated another children’s book into Yiddish. One I never read as a kid: Curious George / dzshordzsh der naygeriker. As with his earlier, The Cat in the Hat / der kats der payats, this one is printed in both the Yiddish and Latin alphabets. Looks like a great gift for a budding Yiddishist.
Thanks to reader, Tim May, I have been corrected on yogh’s being there in Unicode 3.0. (It’s just that I’m five years out of date: see the charts.) There it is: 0x021C and 0x021D. You’ll be happy to know that hwair and wynne made it in, too.
1. Ian sent me an email this morning with a URL pointing at the Merchandising of Vincent Gallo website. Artwork by Charles Manson and sperm donation from Gallo. This is the man who put a hex on Roger Ebert’s colon. [via the Onion A/V Club’s holiday shopping guide] 2. Visited with Krishnan and his wife Santhya last night. She cooked up some great pakoras, and he gave me a sandalwood Ganesh keychain. 3. — 4. I was looking for a yogh in Unicode the other day, but all I could find was ezh. Googling led me to this set of pages: one and two. I have linked to Michael Everson before. He wrote a great article on the problematic spellings of Euro in languages other than English.