In response to the editorial note published recently in JIPA (Wells 1974), we wish to indicate one of the several problems involved in establishing the terminology of diachronic (and morphophonemic) processes. There are evidently three different variables that could be used for classifying (and hence naming) the conditioned sound changes: (1) the environment that induces the change, (2) the sound that undergoes the change, and (3) the sound that results from the change.

In ‘Another note on RP notation’ (1974) Gordon Walsh of the Longman Materials Development Unit made some comments on the 1972 JIPA article of mine, on the notation of the British English segmental phonemes, which had offered an explanation of the symbol choices embodied in my Concise Pronouncing Dictionary and also used by me in the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary of Current English (1974).

Some current applications of the Association's alphabet, for example in EFL practice materials or in dictionaries, make it desirable to establish an ‘alphabetical order’ for the symbols. Various ad hoc orders have been used in the past, especially when giving lists of symbols in practice books, but no generally-agreed ordering has yet emerged (which, in the case of English at least, is perhaps surprising).

It is surely incontestable that the IPA alphabet, like the system of vowel and consonant classification on which it is based, contains obvious anomalies; some or others of which have been discussed in recent proposals for reform (e.g. Breckwoldt 1971, McClure 1972, Hammarström 1973). Fox (1975), in an interesting attempt to widen the scope of the discussion, has argued that the anomalies are less serious than they appear, on the grounds that (a) they do not interfere with the practical usefulness of the alphabet, and (b) a more positive and more fundamental point—they reflect in some cases what appear to be linguistic universals, such as the potential use of retroflex consonants as a distinctive category and the widespread preference for voiced over voiceless nasals.

The analysis of affricates is controversial in many languages. Phonemecizations are often adopted on the basis of criteria specifically related to the individual languages being analysed. After reviewing a few proposed solutions, I will present the one I consider most appropriate for Haitian Creole.

Spanish intonation has been described by several authors and linguists with a variety of subjective terms. Those adjectives which recur most frequently are GRAVE and AGUDO. Grave, which seems to mean ‘low pitch’, is assigned mainly to the dialects of northern Spain and especially to Castilian; agudo, on the other hand, seems to mean ‘high pitch’ and is frequently used to describe the dialects of Spanish America. In this article some objective data will be presented on voice register and intonation in two dialects of Spanish, those of Madrid and Mexico City, as a first step in clarifying the use of these two subjective terms. The results of research presented here are based on tape-recorded interviews with native Spanish speakers and an electronic analysis of those recordings by the Léon-Martin pitch extractor at the University of Toronto.