A consists of one or more phones. In a search pattern, a phones class can match one phone.
If you add or modify a phones class in the Classes dialog box, the Phones Class dialog box appears. You can do any of the following:
Modify the class name.
Add phones to the list of members contained in the class. Phones can be added by entering them directly in the Members box using the keyboard, or by clicking characters in the various phonetic groups above the Members box. The groups are: Consonants, Non Pulmonics, Other Symbols, Vowels, Diacritics, Stress and Length (Suprasegmentals), and Tone and Accents. Each group may be expanded or collapsed by clicking the arrows at the right of the group headings.
To remove phonetic characters from the Members box, click in the box, and then press Delete or Backspace as appropriate.
When attempting to save the changes to a class and the class name is the same as a different class displayed in the Classes dialog box, an error message will be displayed. To avoid this, change the name of the class to an unused name or click Cancel to revert the changes to the class.
After clicking OK to save changes, the list of characters you have specified is parsed so the phones are separated by commas. This is also done as you click phonetic characters from the various phonetic groups, but one final parsing is necessary after clicking OK in case you have entered characters using the keyboard and omitted commas.
If you added characters in your class where non-base characters precede base characters, you may find that the preceding non-base characters disappear after clicking OK to save the changes. This is because Phonology Assistant does not normally recognize phones in which the base character follows a modifier. However, if you want to add, for example, a prenasalized consonant, first add the prenasalized consonant to the Ambiguous Sequences list on the Phone Inventory view. Then you may add it to your class and it will be saved properly.