Re: seriously frustrated!

At 05:50 PM 8/25/03 -0400, you wrote:
><Wilhelm Ulrich Schlaier> scripsit:
>
> >     ok for something like a month I've been trying to figure out what
> symbols
> > like /3:/ and /@/mean to you all because they just confuse me. so would
> some
> > one please tell me what all these strange symbols mean. not just some
> but all.
>
>Well, if you understand the International Phonetic Alphabet, then the
>annotated chart at http://www.i-foo.com/~kturtle/misc/xsamchart.gif
>explains the ASCII characters we use.
...And if you don't understand the International Phonetic Alphabet,  then
you are in for even more serious frustration :)  It took me the better part
of a semester to understand what all those different symbols stand for,
and, to be perfectly honest, there are several of them that I am still not
perfectly clear over what they represent (that would be most of the
gutturals and the clicks), and some others that I know exactly what they
represent but cannot pronounce. (Those would be the back unrounded
vowels.)  (And that's after taking not one, but two, semesters of Phonetics
in college.)

But don't despair...there used to be an online phonetics course somewhere
on the web, and I'll bet that my husband can still find it as long as the
sight is still around.  My husband isn't home now, but I'll ask him about
it later.

BTW, I, too, find the X-SAMPA transcriptions used on the list to be
horribly confusing at times, (and ugly even when they're not confusing) but
if you're limited to ASCII, what can you do?

Isidora