Why incomplete subscript/superscript alphabet ?

[Hans Åberg]

> On 10 Oct 2016, at 23:01, 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 22:15, Julian Bradfield <jcb+unicode at inf.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>>> 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
> 
> It *was* designed, in 1870-something. Try reading the Handbook of the
> IPA. It contains many samples of languages transcribed both in a broad
> phonemic transcription appropriate for the language, and in a narrow
> phonetic transcription which should allow a competent phonetician to
> produce an understandable and reasonably accurate rendition of the
> passage. Indeed, a couple of decades ago, I participated in a public
> engagement event in which a few of us attempted to do exactly that.

But the alveolar clicks requires an extension.