Re: X-X-SAMPA (Keeping the Standard)

> Date:         Wed, 26 Dec 2001 17:20:11 +0100
> From: Christian Thalmann <cinga@...>
>
> It seems some people oppose the tweaking of the established and
> functional yet suboptimal X-SAMPA notation of the IPA, which does make
> sense, seeing how X-SAMPA is already used in a global context.  So
> rather than pleading for a revolution, I'm going to propose another
> *extension* of X-SAMPA.
>
> According to the X-SAMPA chart that I'm using
> (http://www.diku.dk/students/thorinn/xsamchart.gif), the ASCII symbols
> /- , */ seem to be unused so far, for reasons unfathomable.  I propose
> putting them to use in the following way:
Well, according to the PDF file that's also linked from my page, - is
a separator, and * is a general purpose escape.

There's an example of - used to mark non-affricateness, like /at-sign/
for @, and I don't think it'll be hard to come up with other examples
where it's useful in that meaning. So that's a no-go, in my opinion.

On the other hand, John Wells had wanted to use the * for diacritics,
but the SAMPA community wanted to keep it for something really useful
(that they didn't know what would be, but wanted to wait for anyway).
So I don't think there'll be a conflict with official X-SAMPA usage in
the immediate future, if some should want to use it as an alternative
to \.

I think , is held back as general punctuation --- some authors don't
like to use / / to set off IPA notation, but prefer italics, so plain
parentheses, comma and period should unambiguously terminate a string
of X-SAMPA code. But again, if you do use / /, there's no conflict.

And there's # and $ --- are you sure you don't want to use them too?

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)

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