Diphthongs in ASCII (was: CHAT letter names etc)

On Tuesday, March 2, 2004, at 04:39 PM, Mark J. Reed wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 02, 2004 at 06:26:47AM +0000, Ray Brown wrote:
>> [ai] is strictly two vowels.
>
> That depends on whom you ask,
Not if they're pronounced as tw syllables, surely? It's a feature known as
hiatus and does occur in natlangs; e.g. French 'maïs' (Br. maize, sweet
corn; Am. corn) is _disyllabic_. In phonetic transcription [ma'is] would,
I suppose, be clear enough; but stress is not phonemic in French and the
phonemic transcription must be /mais/ - but it ain't a diphthong.

> but you can always join them with a tie bar to
> indicate otherwise: X-SAMPA [a_i], CXS [ai)].
Yep - but I'm not sure what the tie-bar shows here. OK, if its [a_i] we
assume the [a] is syllabic and the [i] ain't. How do you distinguish
between rising and falling diphthongs? For example, [i_u}is ambiguous;
both [ju] and [iw] occur in Brit English dialects.

>> I would wish to put inverted breve beneath the 'i' to show that
>> it is non-syllabic,  but can't, so I use [j] instead.
>
> In both CXS and X-SAMPA the IPA "non-syllabic" diacritic is represented
> by the sequence _^.  So [ai_^] would be an exact equivalent of the IPA
> usage you describe.
Quite - [ai_^] is a wee bit kludgey IMO.  That's what I mean by the
limitations of ASCII.

>> I was under the impression that this usage was fairly standard on this
>> list.
>
> The use of [j] and [w] in diphthongs instead of [i] and [u] is fairly
> widespread, and not just on this list, but we don't do it because of the
> limitations of ASCII; after all, we have an all-ASCII system with the full
> expressive power of the IPA at our disposal.
Sort of.  The recent spate of mails on reforming ASCII-IPA suggests to me
that not everyone is really happy with either X-SAMPA or CXS; we do our
best. Actually, though I tend to use [aj], [ej], [aw] etc., it is not
ideal. To represent "saying" as ['sejIN] is misleading, at least for the
varieties of English I commonly come across, as the second syllable ain't
[jIN].

Which leaves me now wondering what really is the best way of showing
diphthongs in ASCII?

Ray
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