Re: CHAT: XS vs. Kirshenbaum vs. Who-knows-what

On Sun, 25 Jan 2004, Trebor Jung wrote:

> Merhaba!
>
> I read a little while ago (someone's post) that Kirshenbaum IPA
> ASCIIification went out of style a while ago on Conlang, but why?
> Pablo Flores and Mark Rosenfelder(?) still use it.
>
> Why is XS better than KB or any other system - why was it chosen?
> (Maybe because XS was designed by linguists? ... But that's not so
> fair, 'cause XS is ugly - numbers, punctuation... Well, KB etc. use
> those too I'm sure.)
IIRC, Kirsh and many of the other ASCIIfications don't contain letters for
everything. You might consider for instance B\ to be pretty damn ugly, but
it's an awful lot more convenient that B<trl>, and I'm ever so glad
there's a simple way of writing 6. All of them have to use more than just
lowercase letters. Sometimes they use multigraphs, othertimes they use
punctuation, othertimes numbers, and generally all three.

Anyway, everyone here uses XSAMPA or CXS. You've got a reasonable
expectation of being understood if you used them. But once you're out of
lowercase letters, just about everything---including things like @ and N
---are done differently in different systems.

--
Tristan