Re: Revised X-Sampa revision (was [several other things])

Trebor Jung wrote:
> Merhaba!
>
> Michael Potter wrote:
>
>
> "I hope you don't mind a few questions and some (hopefully) constructive
> criticism.
>
> All comments are very welcome! Thanks so much for looking at my system!
>
Thanks for listening. I don't post that much, so it's always a pleasure
to see a reply. :)

> "I like the use of "~" for nasals, and I understand from your reply to BP
> why you chose it.
>
> I was inspired by this question: If you can mark nasality on vowels with a
> tilde, why not do the same with consonants?
>
That's pretty much what I thought when I looked at the nasal section.

> "One question: can I, for example, use "s~" for a voiceless alveolar nasal
> ([n_0] in CXS)?
>
> Absolutely!
>
I accidentally coined a new word while I was thinking about this
question. I wanted to say that your system was either expandable or
extensible, but I couldn't decide which, so my mind wanted to type
"expensible". :)

> "Very nice, much better than [4], etc.
>
> Thanks. I feel I should explain this: I use ; for taps/flaps because, in my
> opinion, these are just short forms of trills.
>
That makes at least as much sense as anything for ";". There's one
system that uses it to represent the following symbol upside-down!

> "This is the only problem I can see. You used "F~" for a labiodental nasal,
> which would lead one to assume that "F" was a plosive. I know there isn't an
> IPA symbol for a labiodental plosive, but this does break the regularity. Is
> there a problem with "v" for the voiced labiodental fricative, and perhaps
> "F, V" for the plosives? This would change the nasal to "V~" and the
> approximant to "V`" though...
>
> Good idea - I will change "F" to "v". I wonder, is there a labiodental
> plosive? I hope so, then the system can be regularized.
>
I was going to say that I had another idea today, but I obviously forgot
what my original idea was, because it's exactly the same as the new one!
I must be losing my mind or something...

> "These are all written like s', sc`, s%, I assume?
>
> Yes. I hope they're not too ugly :) .
>
No uglier than what we already have. :)

> "It's probably just me, but this feels backwards. It must be all those
> diagrams of people facing to the right. Yeah, it's just me, I could get used
> to it. :)
>
> I used this because "advanced" means "more than" and "retracted" means "less
> than".
>
I didn't even think of that! It's those left-facing figures that
supposedly show how to pronounce the IPA vowels, like I said (except
that I said it completely backwards the first time).

> "I don't understand these. Just wondering, why not "a", since you used "i"
> and "e" earlier, and it seems more "open" than "u", like in "say ahh!"?
>
> Good point. I will change it.
>
Be sure to change "U2, U4" to "A2, A4" too, to be consistent with the "i's".

> "Nice."
>
> I chose this because I want it to be very easy to see which syllable is
> stressed - not to have to look elsewhere for this information.
>
> "All in all, I would have to say that your system (and it is a new system,
> not just a revision of X-SAMPA) is very good. It might look unintuitive, but
> it has a regularity that the major schemes lack. Did you try to optimize
> your system for screen reading software? Because it does seem better than
> X-SAMPA.
>
> Thank you very much! I myself like regularity. I did not optimize it for
> screen-reading software - I just wanted to make a regular system; since I
> can read letter by letter, I don't have to worry about legibility to my
> software (unless it's Unicode and with some really weird characters, but
> that's a different story altogether!).
>
> --Trebor
>
I asked about the screen-reader because it does look like your system
would be better (i.e. easier to program) in text/speech conversion. I
didn't think of letter-by-letter reading, but even then, a consistent
multigraph (polygraph?) system would lighten the memory load on both the
program and the listener.

I'm glad I could help, especially considering the fact that I don't know
much at all about phonetics, and what I do know is only because of the
group here.

--
Michael