Why incomplete subscript/superscript alphabet ?

[Julian Bradfield]

On 2016-10-10, Hans Åberg <haberg-1 at telia.com> wrote:
>> On 10 Oct 2016, at 21:42, Doug Ewell <doug at ewellic.org> wrote:
>> Hans Åberg wrote:
>>> I think that IPA might be designed for broad phonetic transcriptions
>>> [1], with a requirement to distinguish phonemes within each given
>>> language.
...
>> IPA can be used pretty much as broadly or as narrowly as one wishes.
>
> Within each language, but is not designed to capture differences between different languages or dialects.

What do you mean? The IPA in narrow transcription is intended to
provide as detailed a description as a human mind can manage of
sounds. It doesn't care whether you're describing differences between
languages or differences within languages (a distinction that is not
in any case well defined).

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