Re: More ASCII IPA suggestions ...

Quoting Carsten Becker <post@...>:

> > Affricates and double articulations may optionally be inclosed in { } to
> > disambiguate. Alternatively, affricate or double articulation may be
> assumed,
> > and clusters separated by '-'. Note that normal parentesis and square
> brackets
> > retain their IPA functions!
>
> I'd even put diphtongs and/or glides into brackets, e.g. {Aj}, {aU}. A
> hyphen would also make sense, especially if you don't like having brackets
> in brackets (if you use square brackets, e.g. [Ek_s "sEmp@] like I use to)
As indicated further down in the original post, { } can be used to enclose
diphthongs. However, it
would be rather redundant much of the time, and I can see no reason to make it
obligatory. IPA doesn't require a tiebar on diphthongs either.

> > Vowels:
> >
> > |  i  y        i\ u\    M  u
> > |      I  Y    I\ U\     U
> > |    e  2      @\ 8     7  o
> > |                @
> > |      E  9    3  3\    V  O
> > |       &        6
> > |        a  &\          A  Q
>
> Huh? [M] was a voiceless [m], wasn't it?
I'm fairly certain I've not assigned any signs for voiceless nasals - they've
not got any IPA signs, and are quite rare (as phonemes, at any rate).
Voiceless 'm' would be [m_0]. You may be thinking of [W] as the voiceless
equivalent of [w].


> > For tone, I don't have any improvements on CXS to suggest ATM. However, if
> '<'
> > and '>' are freed up, I'm thinking they could be used to enclose tonal
> info.
> > Eg, [ma<TMH>] would be the syllable "ma" with an obnoxious extra
> high-mid-high
> > contour tone on. Since ! and ^ have been hijacked, it would also allow us
> to
> > use <!> and <^> for downstep and upstep.
>
> Yay! No numbers from 1-5 anymore which don't make tone clear I think - at
> least *I* never knew which one belongs to which tone. <TMH> etc. are a good
> idea (although not nice looking and more at the Kirshenbaum end) because
> English QUERTY keyboards AFAIK do not support directly typing ^, ´ and `
> over letters, do they?
No idea (pretty much never use the "real" QWERTY, but the Swedish variant
thereof, or German QWERTZ), but that's of little interest, since this scheme
is supposed to be ASCII-compatible, and thus does not use accented characters.

The < > strings doesn't look good (and can go horribly wrong in html mail -
yet another reason to send in plain text!), but X-SAMPA/CXS [ma_T_M_H]
certainly isn't cute either.

All this, however, rather hinges on freeing up '<' and '>' first. While
leaving the CXS indications of implosives and ejectives, as well as the signs
for those epiglottals doesn't intoduce any real ambiguity (tonal infons will
never be imediately preceeded by an underline, nor followed by a backslash), I
think the potential for confusion is a bit too great. Again, anyone's got
suggestions?

> The turned around ^ wouldn't be possible with a
> QUERTZ/AZERTY keyboard either and needs Unicode as well.
No-one's suggested using a hacek for anything, to my knowledge. Using it in
what's supposed to be an ASCII-compatible scheme would be pure folly.

> Other possibilities
> to "enclose tonal info" could be using horizontal dashes: |TMH|, although
> these could be easily mixed up with [I]'s and [l]'s,
The pipe is already used for minor groups anyway.

> depending on the font
> you're using. Well, in serif fonts this doesn't matter, but if you look at
> non-serif fonts... rather difficult to tell apart when having only a quick
> look.
>
> >
> > Diacritics:
> >
> > _0   voiceless (zero)
> > _v   voiced
> > ^h   aspirated
> > _o   more rounded (using lowercase lessens risk for confusion with _0)
> > _c   less rounded
> > _+   advanced
> > _-   retracted
> > ¨    centralized (did not seem to be any reason not get rid of the
> underline)
> > *    mid-centralized
> > =    syllabic
> > =    non-syllabic (can't think of any symbol that need distinct syllabic
> and
> > non-syllabic diacritics!)
> > `    rhoticity
> > _¨   breathy voiced
>
> The trema requires typing in an ALT+0000 combination. Not possible on
> QUERTY/QUERTZ at least. And remember, English and other languages have no
> <ä>, <ö> or <ü> (in Swedish <y> nevertheless) and thus do not require keys
> for those letters. Btw, <ë>, <ÿ> require ALT combinations in every case on
> English, German and French keyboards.
Ack, that should've been a quotation mark, not a trema:

"   centralized
_"  breathy voiced

You seem, however, to operate under the misapprehension that you'd get any
real diacritics in this scheme - even with the trema, you'd got [e¨], not **
[ë], for a centralized [e].

> > _~   creaky voiced (these two increase similarity to the IPA)
> > _N   linguolabial
> > ^w   labialized
> > ^j   palatalized
> > ^G   velarized
> > ^?\  pharyngealized
> > _e   velarized or pharyngealized (no, I don't know why we need this)
> > ^r   raised
> > ^o   lowered (these written as if superscripts to free up _o for more
> rounded)
> > _A   advanced tongue root
> > _q   retracted tongue root
> > _d   dental
> > _a   apical
> > _m   laminal
> > _s   sublaminal
> > ~    nasalized (notice that _~ is NOT a valid alternative for nasalization
> in
> > this scheme!)
> > _n   nasal release
> > _l   lateral release
> > _`   no audible release (similarish to IPA diacritic, and I hate brackets
> used
> > for non-brackety purposes)
>
> And how is this scheme supposed to be called? JX-SAMPA (Johansson's
> X-Sampa)? BTW, what does SAMPA stand for? X- is "extended" AFAIK.
Well, I've not thought of that. 'JXS' should be of tolerable length and
opacity, I think.

                                                        Andreas