Why incomplete subscript/superscript alphabet ?

[Hans Åberg]

> On 10 Oct 2016, at 22:15, Julian Bradfield <jcb+unicode at inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
> 
> 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).

It is designed for phonemic transcriptions, cf.,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_International_Phonetic_Alphabet