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

Merhaba!

Michael Potter wrote:

"First of all, I want to say that this is an admirable job. I can barely
read X-SAMPA as it is, and I can't imagine how bad it would be with a screen
reader. :)

The good thing is that I can make it read letter by letter, word by word,
line by line etc., not just the whole page. There's even a button I can
press to read *everything* on the screen, not just the text (icons etc.).

"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!

"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?

"One question: can I, for example, use "s~" for a voiceless alveolar nasal
([n_0] in CXS)?

Absolutely!

"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.

"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.

"These are all written like s', sc`, s%, I assume?

Yes. I hope they're not too ugly :) .

"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 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.

"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

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