For example, a version of it is the standard for the transcription of Arabic in articles published in the Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, the journal of the German Oriental Society.
Americanist notation relies on diacritics to distinguish many other distinctions that are phonemic in the languages it transcribes.
On the other hand, Americanist notation uses single letters for most coronal affricates, whereas the IPA requires digraphs.
Otherwise Americanist notation has grown increasingly similar to IPA, and has abandoned many of the more obscure letters it once employed.
Useful sources explaining the symbols – some with comparisons of the alphabets used at different times – are Campbell (1997:xii-xiii), Goddard (1996:10–16), Langacker (1972:xiii-vi), Mithun (1999:xiii-xv), and Odden (2005).
Americanist phonetic notation does not require a strict harmony among character styles: letters from the Greek and Latin alphabets are used side-by-side.
Another contrasting feature is that, to represent some of the same sounds, the Americanist tradition relies heavily on letters modified with diacritics; whereas the IPA, which reserves diacritics for other specific uses, gave Greek and Latin letters new shapes.
The Americanist linguists were interested in a phonetic notation that could be easily created from typefaces 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.
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.
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.
It is ironic that when they were published, posthumously, by the University of California Press, the texts were "reorthographized", as the editor's introduction put it: the IPA symbols Uldall had used were removed and replaced by others.
The hostility derives ultimately from the existence, in most American universities, of Speech Departments, which we do not have in Britain.
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.
Differences from the IPA fall into a few broad categories: use of diacritics to derive the other coronal and dorsal articulations from the alveolar and velar, respectively; use of c j λ ƛ for affricates; y for its consonantal value, and r for a tap rather than a trill.
Apart from the ambiguity of the rhotics below, and minor graphic variants (ȼ g γ for c ɡ ɣ and the placement of the diacritic in g̑ γ̑), this is compatible with the WIELD recommendations.
Pike (1947) provides the following set of symbols: Voiceless, voiced and syllabic consonants may also be C̥, C̬ and C̩, as in IPA.
Pike (1947) provides the following tone marks: Stress is primary ˈCV or V́ and secondary ˌCV or V̀.
[12][13] The IETF language tags register fonnapa as a subtag for text in this notation.