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Mark Beadles
Mark Beadles
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This "bunched or molar R" sound is widely acknowledged as existing, but has engendered a lot of discussion, not just about its symbol but its exact articulatory nature and even its acoustic distinguishability from a retroflex r.

As you note, this sound is discussed at some length in the original Laver 1994 book Principles of Phonetics. Laver himself did not think a satisfactory symbol existed and proposed the symbol ψ (Trask 1996 gives this as Ψ). Laver also suggested potentially using the tongue-root-retraction symbol ̙ (Unicode Combining Right Tack Below) but in a superscript position -- for which there is no Unicode symbol -- in combination with "an existing approximant symbols of suitable lingual and labial attributes". Tellingly, in my opinion, he didn't give an example of what that proposal would look like.

Martin Ball in a 2011 poster [link to original Word document] has proposed ɹ̈ (alveolar approximant with the centralization diacritic) which seems reasonable, and has the advantages of being expressible in Unicode and not requiring a non-IPA symbol.

This "bunched or molar R" sound is widely acknowledged as existing, but has engendered a lot of discussion, not just about its symbol but its exact articulatory nature and even its acoustic distinguishability from a retroflex r.

As you note, this sound is discussed at some length in the original Laver 1994 book Principles of Phonetics. Laver himself did not think a satisfactory symbol existed and proposed the symbol ψ (Trask 1996 gives this as Ψ). Laver also suggested potentially using the tongue-root-retraction symbol ̙ (Unicode Combining Right Tack Below) but in a superscript position -- for which there is no Unicode symbol -- in combination with "an existing approximant symbols of suitable lingual and labial attributes". Tellingly, in my opinion, he didn't give an example of what that proposal would look like.

Martin Ball in a 2011 poster has proposed ɹ̈ (alveolar approximant with the centralization diacritic) which seems reasonable, and has the advantages of being expressible in Unicode and not requiring a non-IPA symbol.

This "bunched or molar R" sound is widely acknowledged as existing, but has engendered a lot of discussion, not just about its symbol but its exact articulatory nature and even its acoustic distinguishability from a retroflex r.

As you note, this sound is discussed at some length in the original Laver 1994 book Principles of Phonetics. Laver himself did not think a satisfactory symbol existed and proposed the symbol ψ (Trask 1996 gives this as Ψ). Laver also suggested potentially using the tongue-root-retraction symbol ̙ (Unicode Combining Right Tack Below) but in a superscript position -- for which there is no Unicode symbol -- in combination with "an existing approximant symbols of suitable lingual and labial attributes". Tellingly, in my opinion, he didn't give an example of what that proposal would look like.

Martin Ball in a 2011 poster [link to original Word document] has proposed ɹ̈ (alveolar approximant with the centralization diacritic) which seems reasonable, and has the advantages of being expressible in Unicode and not requiring a non-IPA symbol.

Source Link
Mark Beadles
Mark Beadles
  • 6.9k
  • 2
  • 25
  • 46

This "bunched or molar R" sound is widely acknowledged as existing, but has engendered a lot of discussion, not just about its symbol but its exact articulatory nature and even its acoustic distinguishability from a retroflex r.

As you note, this sound is discussed at some length in the original Laver 1994 book Principles of Phonetics. Laver himself did not think a satisfactory symbol existed and proposed the symbol ψ (Trask 1996 gives this as Ψ). Laver also suggested potentially using the tongue-root-retraction symbol ̙ (Unicode Combining Right Tack Below) but in a superscript position -- for which there is no Unicode symbol -- in combination with "an existing approximant symbols of suitable lingual and labial attributes". Tellingly, in my opinion, he didn't give an example of what that proposal would look like.

Martin Ball in a 2011 poster has proposed ɹ̈ (alveolar approximant with the centralization diacritic) which seems reasonable, and has the advantages of being expressible in Unicode and not requiring a non-IPA symbol.