IPA Ambiguous Characters

Several IPA characters are ambiguous, meaning some have more than one interpretation and are not always used according to official standards. For example, superscript diacritics before a letter usually mean a change at the beginning of a sound but at other times show a modification at the end of the sound. This ambiguity makes it essential for authors to be specific about the meanings of the symbols they employ. 

Characters Doing Double Duty

The manner of articulation is how the airstream flows from the lungs and out through the nose and mouth. Languages do not differentiate sounds that are articulated further back in the mouth, such as voiced fricatives and approximants. 

• Approximant sounds are all voiced and do not cause total obstructions of the voice but result from the narrowings of the tract in different ways at various positions.  
• Fricative sounds result from a significant narrowing of the air path, causing the airflow to make noise or turbulence. This turbulent noise is added to the sound of the air through the opening between the vocal folds (glottis) in the larynx and produces voiced fricatives.

Voiced fricatives are created with a closed glottis which can lead to two concurrent sources, speech in the larynx and turbulence in the area of constriction. In some cases, the glottal “fricatives” are called approximants because some sounds produce the same amount of fricatives as voiceless approximants. 

Approximates and fricatives also require different levels of precision. When approximants are emphasized, they can be slightly fricated or turbulent. For example, some Spanish words have a palatal approximant similar to fricatives when the speech is emphatic. Some letters are defined as fricatives but are vaguely approximant, and the distinction is only partially enforced.

Possible Causes of Ambiguity

Some characters are optional but are kept due to passivity and would be hard to explain today by the modern standards of the IPA. This may be an effect of analysis to some degree because it’s easy for people to match up the letters available to the sounds of their language, and they don’t find it necessary to be phonetically proper. 

Some characters are transcribed a certain way in one language but differently in another, creating the ambiguity mentioned above. Sometimes, the symbol is a historical remnant or only phonemically unique in one language. In other languages, there are several consonants without a dedicated IPA letter, and some characters do not exist in any language. 

The symbol ⟨ɧ⟩ is officially a postalveolar and velar fricative at the same time and is retained because it is convenient for the transcription of Swedish, where it signifies a consonant that has various meanings in different dialects. In actuality, it is a phonemic character, not a phonetic one, and outside the responsibility of the IPA.