As I said in a recent post,

There are a number of now-obsolete letters used predominantly by Sinologists to transcribe various Chinese languages. There’s a rather lengthy Wikipedia article on the topic. These include the aforementioned ɿ as well as ʅ, ʮ, ʯ, ᴀ, ȡ, ȶ, ȵ and ȴ. I’ve surely been guilty of using ȵ here on more than one occasion. But I try not to, if for no other reason than clarity. IPA is a standard and I like to stick to them closely if at all. But then there’s ɿ again.

In my latest purge of un-needed things from my apartment I found a Chinese textbook I bought a couple years ago. It’s the New Practical Chinese Reader (新实用汉语课本) published by 北京语言大学 in 2002 and then again in 2006. Mine’s the ‘06 model. It’s a series of books, I think three total though I only picked up the first two. 58RMB if you’re interested, but I’m not sure if that’s the first book alone or both together.

Anyway jump to page 51 where it talks about the finals -er and -i, that latter of which it marks as [ɿ]. Blast.

I was already tempted to ditch ẓ altogether in favour of ɿ. I realise it really is a non-issue, considering the very few readers here and then of those the very few who give a crap about IPA. So I’m switching, joining the countless texts published in the last few years using ɿ over ẓ. I’ll use outdated and discontinued IPA for this one sound, still making an effort to label it accordingly in a footnote or elsewhere if relevant.

So apologies to the purists. I never really liked ẓ much to begin with.