Re: C-IPA underlying principles and methods

Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>OK, since it seems that people are actually interested in my IPA-ASCII
>scheme,
>here is a presentation of its underlying principles and a glimpse at how it
>currently looks like (only a glimpse because not all symbols are chosen
>yet).
>Basically, this is C-IPA (for "Christophe's IPA" or "Conlanger's IPA")
>version
>0.1 Beta ;))) .
First things first; how am I supposed to pronounce "C-IPA"? [sai.pa]?

>OK, the underlying idea behind the C-IPA was to provide a scheme that
>doesn't
>make some simple characters of IPA look like line noise in ASCII (unlike
>what X-
>SAMPA and Kirshenbaum often do). The reason is that conlangers often
>take "exotic" sounds in their conlangs and may want a scheme that doesn't
>make
>the ASCII transliteration of the pronunciation of their words look like
>some
>monstruosity which makes Klingon's transliteration in Roman characters look
>like a parangon of aesthetics ;)) .
>
>The basic principles of C-IPA are thus:
>- only the characters of the 7-bit ASCII are usable (of course! ;)) ),
>namely:
>a-z A-Z 0-9 ! " ' ( ) , - . / : ; ? [ ] { } # $ % & * + < = > @ \ ^ _ ` | ~
>and
>the space.
>- simple small characters from the IPA are taken straight from it. Small
>capitals from the IPA are taken straight as capitals in C-IPA (it means
>that
>the uvular nasal in IPA becomes N in C-IPA, but the velar nasal doesn't
>have a
>simple equivalent. I know this is not common to give an uncommon sound a
>simple
>transliteration, but my point here is to transliterate the IPA in a version
>that allows us to quickly find back the IPA form, not to "correct" mistakes
>of
>designs of the IPA).
>- this is the main principle of C-IPA: each place of articulation, manner
>of
>articulation or position used by the IPA to organise its sounds (or almost
>all
>of them) are provided with a diacritic (appearing as a non-letter character
>behind the modified character), which can be used behind any meaningful
>character to put it in the place, manner or whatever of articulation
>*without
>changing its other parameters*. Basically those diacritics are shortcuts to
>move in the IPA tables.
>- this is the second-main principle of C-IPA: some IPA diacritics see their
>use
>enlarged to the level of diacritics as in the previous principle. This is
>difficult to explain but easy with an example: IPA has diacritics
>for "advanced" and "retracted" used with vowels. Those are adopted as place
>of
>articulation changers for both vowels *and* consonants. Basically, the
>diacritic for "advanced" is used to advance the place of articulation of
>one
>rank to the front of the mouth (so for instance it can be used to mark
>dental
>consonants from alveolar ones). In the same way, the "retracted" diacritic
>is
>used to retract the PoA one place to the back of the mouth (thus retracting
>bilabials to labiodentals for instance). With vowels, it serves to move
>them
>from front to center to back and vice-versa. In the same way, the
>diacritics
>for "raised" and "lowered" are used to move of manner of articulation (this
>is
>a feature already present in IPA itself).
>- this previous principle may bring (rarely) some ambiguities: what if I
>want
>to really use the "retracted" diacritic for its actual IPA use. That's
>where
>the universal tie bar-diacritic marker comes in handy. It's the same
>principle
>as X-SAMPA which uses _ both as tie bar and diacritic marker, one of its
>good
>features. C-IPA uses the same feature (but not necessarily the same
>character
>for it).
>- there's more than one way to do it! (and I swear I didn't know it was
>Perl's
>motto when I first uttered it :)) ) As you may realise by now already, with
>such principles many IPA characters have various ways to be rendered in
>C-IPA.
>Indeed, and all those various ways are all valid! The point is that
>redundancy
>is a good thing here to reduce ambiguity, choose a way to render an IPA
>letter
>which shows also some phenomenon happening in the language or just to fit
>the
>aesthetics of the writer. But all those ways are transparent once you know
>the
>rules.
>- the last principle is also borrowed from X-SAMPA: go for similarity with
>the
>actual IPA shapes, but don't try to make a geometric equivalent of them.
>
>Those are the main principles in work with the C-IPA. Now, the actual
>implementation of those is not stable yet. I want the result to be
>aesthetic
>and somewhat mnemonic, and it's difficult to choose between the available
>characters. But I can give you an example of what I mean with those
>complicated
>principles, although you must remember that the choice of actual characters
>is
>not set in stone and I actually don't find it that satisfying.
>
>Now for those PoA, MoA, etc... diacritics:
>stop: |
>nasal: ~
>trill: (no diacritic)
>tap: *
>fricative: \ (I don't like it at all!)
>lateral fricative: (no diacritic?)
>approximant: < (supposed to show that they are more "open")
>lateral approximant: (no diacritic)
>devoicing: 0 (not much choice)
>voicing: _ (not quite what I want, but can't find better yet :(( )
>"advanced": +
>"retracted": -
>"raised": {
>"lowered": } (not quite satisfied with those two)
>retroflex: `
>click: !
>implosive, ejective: / (should I provide two different symbols for those?)
>roundedness, unroundedness, laxness: (no idea yet :(( )
>tiebar-diacritic marker: ^
>
>How do they work now? Easy: take any simple character, for instance the
>voiceless alveolar fricative s (taken straight from IPA, since it's a
>simple
>character). If you advance it: s+, you get the voiceless *dental* fricative
>(T
>in X-SAMPA).
>If you retract it: s-, you get the voiceless *postalveolar*
>fricative (S in X-SAMPA, although I'm thinking of taking it as S in C-IPA
>too,
>not that it will make the previous version wrong anyway :)) ). If you voice
>it:
>s_, you get the *voiced* alveolar fricative (also z in C-IPA. As I said,
>there's more than one way to do it. And reversely, z0 is equivalent to s
>:)) ).
>If you raise it: s{, you get a stop, that's to say the same as t. And
>you're
>allowed to use diacritics more than once, so s++ is equivalent to f, but
>that's
>a bit stupid isn't it? ;)))
The s-oid sounds being what they are, things seems to be going a little to
easy here. How to indicate X-SAMPA [s_d] as opposed to [T], for instance?
I'm having an idea on the later down, so read on ...

>Another example is that p! is the bilabial click,
>while p\ is the voiceless bilabial fricative (like X-SAMPA, but its voiced
>form
>is simply b\ here - or p\_, or v+, whatever you want :)) ) and p/ is the
>bilabial ejective.
>
>As you can see above, for many PoA and some MoA I didn't provide
>diacritics.
>That's because I only have a limited amount of letters, and the way the
>simple
>characters are distributed, I can easily reach most if not all the IPA
>characters. There's no diacritic for the trill, because they all correspond
>to
>simple characters here: B, r and R. From them you can get the others: r*
>(or
>r}) is the alveolar flap, r< (or z<, or d<, whatever you want) is the
>alveolar
>approximant, R< (or g<) is the velar approximant. There's no diacritic for
>laterals, since they are all simple to reach: l is the alveolar lateral, l`
>the
>retroflex one, L+ the palatal one and L the velar one (since small capital
>L is
>velar in IPA). And l\ is the voiced lateral fricative (which can also be
>l{),
>although here I'm thinking of using $ for the voiceless lateral fricative,
>and
>thus the voiced one can also be $_.
>
>Ans what about vowels? Well, on those I didn't work that much, but from the
>simple ones you can already get many. For instance, e} is X-SAMPA E
>(although
>I'm thinking of taking it as E in C-IPA too), a{ is ae-ligature (which is
>also
>& in C-IPA :)) ) and i- is barred-i (see how the principles behind C-IPA
>provide some very mnemonic results in some places :)) ). As for slashed-o
>(close-mid rounded front vowel), I could always render it o++ if I'm not
>afraid
>of being ridiculous :)) . And of course, rhoticity is simply rendered by `,
>as
>retroflexion. No ambiguity possible.
>
>And as I said, using the tiebar sign restores the IPA value of the
>diacritic,
>so if i- is barred-i, i^- is simply retracted i (underlined i in IPA). And
>by
>the rule that says that things have to look like the IPA, it's simple to
>indicate palatalisation: ^j, labialisation: ^w, lateral release: ^l, etc...
>(the same rule provides us with ? for the glottal stop of course :) )
>
>As for suprasegmentals, although I didn't work much on them, I know that
>length
>is obviously :, primary stress ', secondary stress , and syllable break . .
>
>As you see, this system makes for probably more digraphs than X-SAMPA, but
>it
>also makes for less trigraphs and a lot less other polygraphs, and doesn't
>make "exotic" sounds anymore difficult to write than they are already in
>IPA
>itself. Also, since the principles behind the formations of those digraphs
>are
>straightforward, you don't need to actually learn them all, as long as you
>know
>the rules. The system is kind of "agglutinative" :) .
>
>So, what do you all think of such a scheme? As I told you, only the
>principles
>are set, the actual implementation is not stable yet (and not complete
>anyway).
>If you have some ideas that may make it more aesthetic, I'd be happy to
>hear
>them :) . And suggestions for diacritics of roundedness, unroundedness and
>laxness would be more than welcome (although I could always consider that
>X-
>SAMPA U is rendered u{ or Y-- ;))) ).
>
>I'm eager to hear your comments! :) (praises are welcome too ;)) )
The first impression is that it may be uglier than X-SAMPA for familiar
things ([TIN] morphs into something like [s+IN+]!!), but nicer for more
exotic things ([u+:t] for [}:t] for something that's not exotic to me at all
...).

There's quite a few letters whose small caps versions don't mean anything in
IPA, but whose uppercase versions have pretty well-established values in the
traditions of ASCIIIPAs (sorry, couldn't resist triple capital "i"); I'm
thinking primarily of [A E O S Z T D]. I'd heartily recomend including
those, tho' of course not rejecting the alternative analytic notations like
[a-] (or [a--] if you think there's room for low centrals). Pretty much
everyone use these already, and it helps alleviate the [s+IN+] thing. I want
[;] for half-length too, but that may be just me (altho' I challenge the
list to argue against the mnemonic value of colon indicating length and
_semi_colon _half_-length). Having [T] for X-SAMPA [T] also frees [s+] for
X-SAMPA [s_d].

                                             Andreas

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