I do think it is safe to assume /c/ for ‹q›, or at least a palatalised /kʲ/, and that the annotation as “kj” was only a crutch, because “c” was used for /ts/ and other IPA symbols were not available (e.g.“ëS” for [əʃ].
A few years back, I had the discussion of whether “qátor” wasn’t supposed to be /cator/, because it is derived from the Insular (p-)Celtic word for the numeral, which has a palatal velar stop. Cresti, if I remember correctly, seemed to agree.
Sir Tomás gives [k
atër] as the pronunciation of qator in his 1999 addenda/errata to the ScurzGram (
link), though I wouldn't mind allowing ['kjatər] or ['kjator] as long as we can all agree that its spelled with a Q. Though if I'm honest, I thought
qator was derived from
quattuor as a replacement of the former Celtic form
ceatháir [k
ahër] (which, as you said, should've had [c]).
Interesting. I am not sure however to interpret the part with “posh/mush”, because that does not rhyme for me even with the shwa. ScGr2 says: “When the ending is stressed, it is pronounced [aS]. When unstressed, it is pronounced [ëS]. […] Two irregular verbs have aberrant endings, but still end in -rë. These aberrant verbs are irë [iëS] […]”
Personally, I interpret this as Madison not understanding how i-stem verbs work. I will shrug at that for the moment, but I would suggest either a spelling reform to “íar(h)” and “tíar(h)”, or actually using a spelling pronunciation.
It's really annoying that talossan.com insisted on using Englishy pronunciation guides instead of the IPA because of stuff like this. In General American, "posh" and "mush" would be pronounced as [pɑʃ] and [mʌ̟ʃ] respectively, which would be clumsy approximations of [aʃ] and [əʃ]. Not really a fan of "pronunciation reforms" honestly.
I mean, I do not really care. Both seem valid and logical, but the “-rh” is somewhat unique, and worth keeping as an infinitive suffix, too.
-rh for the infinitive was probably the second most controversial aspect of the 2007 reform, right after Î-gate. Personally I'm just glad that there was an agreement one way or the other.
By the way, one correction I do have, I checked again, is that “acestilor” should have a [ʃ] for the “s”, because ScGr2 lists it as “aCeSCëlër”.
Right, my mistake. I'll fix that right away.
As to the /l/ → [ð], I think there may be a case for the /l/ becoming a voiced interdental fricative intervocalically, at least optionally, because ScGr2 says: Other peculiar phonetic features include the fronting of word-initial [l] to [D] (as in English “this”) between vowels: the phrases la divertà (“the fun”) and la livertà (“the liberty”) are pronounced alike: [la Diverta]. This innovation has even crept into a few word-medial situations, e.g. fodiclâ [foDiklë], “follicle”.
I'm not sure. For me it's pretty telling that Ben felt the need to respell it with a D even back then. Ben seemed to think it was just an exception to the rule. I mean, I guess we could go and ask him sometimes.
EDIT: For the purposes of this temporary short-term standard though, I'd rather stay as safe as humanly possible and leave the big reforms to the Unified Standard.