Re: SAMPA from IPA

From: "David Barrow" <davidab@...>

> The sound represented by G in IPA is represented by G\ in SAMPA, and G
> in SAMPA is used to represent in IPA what looks like a V with a loop
> underneath it
That's a gamma (though a real Greek lowercase gamma looks more elegant).
What's ironic is that I use the letter gamma, both capital and lowercase, to
transliterate the voiced uvular stop of Tech (and lambda for the voiceless
lateral affricate).

The reason for this, and the other anomalies: [beta] is more common than
[B], [eng] is more common than [N], [inverted R] is more common than [R],
[inverted y] is more common than [L] (at least phonemically).

And there were not many letters left when they needed something for Spanish
n-tilde, Welsh ll, Vietnamese o-horn/Estonian o-tilde and others, so they
came up with [J], [K] and [7] (the last one is cardinal vowel 7 so it got
that X-SAMPA character).

I think they did the best they could considering the limitations of ASCII...

Replies