The plans for the Convention for the revision of the Association's alphabet are proceeding well; anyone wishing to attend who has not yet sent in a preregistration form should contact me at the above address as soon as possible. Coordinators of the different interest groups have been appointed as shown on the list below. They are all preparing preliminary reports, some of which are being published or summarized in this issue of the Journal. Members of the Association who sent in a preregistration form before September 1988 should have heard from the coordinators of the groups in which they expressed an interest. Anyone else who has material that should be considered at the Convention is urged to contact the appropriate coordinator as soon as possible. A complete list of names and addresses follows this note. The more discussion we can have before the meeting, the better it will be.

As part of the preparation for the meeting on the revision of the International Phonetic Alphabet, I have been asked to write a short summary of my correspondence with a number of members of the Association on the principles on which the alphabet should be based. To this end, I have sought the views of the 34 respondents who gave first or second rank to this topic on the preregistration form for the 1989 Convention.

The Journal has received this newsletter which describes a well-developed system for the computer coding of phonetic symbols. Although the account shows a bias towards the transcription of English, the system does provide for an unusually wide range of prosodic codes and of diacritic symbols, including some for which the current International Phonetic Alphabet makes no provision. Given the Journal's active interest in the subject of computer coding of phonetic symbols, and the wish to encourage further debate and comment in our pages, we are publishing this particular newsletter in its entirety. In the discussion of the symbols, it is necessary to be able to distinguish ‘l’ (lower case ‘l’) from ‘i’ (upper case ‘i’). We have therefore used the serifed typeface of the original for the citation of the symbol forms (—Ed.).

This paper summarizes the discussion which has taken place up to December 1988 in preparation for the Vowel group at the Association's Convention to be held in Kiel in August 1989. As coordinator of the Vowel group I sent out a questionnaire to those prospective participants who, on their pre-registration form, had listed vowel classification as being among their first five interests. Thirty-eight questionnaires were dispatched, and 24 responses were received by shortly after the deadline specified. Allowing for one case where the participant was ‘not known’ at the address listed, and possibly a couple of other questionnaires going variously astray, this relatively high rate of return within the short time-span available must reflect the importance with which this topic is viewed.

Ear training is an essential element in any phonetics or pronunciation teaching. In recent years I have been developing an ear-training method based on repeater tapes (each line repeated nine or ten times) of ‘unusual’ personalities and accents. The recordings are first transcribed by rule of thumb according to our own norm (RP English, Standard Dutch, etc.) and the idea is that the major differences from this norm are then listened to and analysed. If the observations are summarized at the end, one has a fair idea of what is characteristic of that particular type of speech. By way of illustration I shall present such a summary of 85 seconds of speech by The Rt Hon. Margaret Thatcher, the British Prime Minister, taken from an interview on Dutch television made in 1982. It will appear that we do not only analyse phonetic phenomena, but cannot help noticing in this case their semantic impact as well. Perhaps our observations may be of some interest to semanticists and psychologists as well as phoneticians.

The focus of interest for the working group on Suprasegmental Categories – like that of other groups working on ‘the phonetic theory that the symbols represent’ – should primarily be on theoretical considerations. A main objective would therefore be to come up with a set of categories to be symbolized within the IPA framework. As a first step in this direction I have as the coordinator of the group devised a tentative list of such suprasegmental categories to be discussed within the working group. In a circular letter accompanying the list of suprasegmental categories I expressed the opinion that suprasegmentals within the IPA framework are not primarily in need of revision but rather addition. Another issue addressed in this letter is the question of the level of abstraction on which symbolization should take place for suprasegmental categories like stress and prominence relations as well as boundary signals, which seem to have a complex cueing with several phonetic correlates. I also expressed the possibility that the increasing number of discourse studies and studies of spontaneous speech may also call for an extension of symbols for suprasegmental categories that are not met in read speech and monologue and are not traditionally considered to be linguistic.

The International Phonetic alphabet (IPA) has been standardized and published in two main forms: the one in The Principles of the International Phonetic Association (1949) and the one in the revised chart issued in 1979. A further revision, perhaps quite radical, may be expected at some point after the 1989 Convention in Kiel. I am concerned here with general questions about the way the IPA as it presently exists should be presented to consumers.

In preparation for the IPA Kiel Convention in 1989, this report summarizes preliminary discussions of possible improvements and changes to individual symbols and diacritics in the International Phonetic Alphabet. It details responses to a questionnaire sent out on 22 October 1988. Specific questions were suggested by a number of sources: my own paper (Henton 1987), reactions to that paper, and from discussions with other phoneticians. The questionnaire was written with a view to eliciting simple and democratic input, rather than to promoting certain symbols or suggestions over others. It was sent to 38 members of the Association who rated the section on ‘Individual symbols and diacritics’ 1–5 (on a scale of 17, with 1 being highest preference) in their reponses to the invitation to revise the International Phonetic Association's alphabet. Eighty members originally replied to the call for input to the Kiel meeting, so the 38 who placed this section high in their preferences are a good portion (47%) of members actively concerned with this Convention.

Ideally, we want to be able to state authoritatively which of the IPA's stipulations meet with acceptance, which are regarded as controversial, and which appear to have failed to make any impact at all. Account will have to be taken of the work not only of phoneticians, but also of colleagues in any discipline which uses phonetic terminology and notation.

Several systems have been developed to produce the complete inventory of IPA symbols in computer-coded form. Each has its own detail of coding, with a common core (albeit fairly small) of phonetically or graphemically logical key and ASCII assignments that can be identified across systems. Variation in the assignment of symbols to codes and keystroke locations is the result of different configurations of input device and of output device, and of differences in local convention and ease of character entry, of immediate needs in the transcription task, and of project objectives. The two major categories of coding objectives are: (a) for the purpose of identifying individual graphic IPA symbols by number, and (b) for the purpose of specifying the phonetic properties of the sound represented by each symbol or combination of symbols for the efficient encoding, recall, and manipulation of that information in a computerized data base.