From: "Andreas Johansson" <andjo@...>
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2004 8:36 PM
Subject: Re: More ASCII IPA suggestions ...
[snipping lots of text]
> IPA doesn't require a tiebar on diphthongs either.
Oh! I always thought there would be one.
>
> > > 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].
Damn, I haven't had that chart at hand.
>
>
> > > 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.
Huh? Where was my brain when I wrote that? I wanted to say that those <> do
not look nice (as you also say below). In normal text I've seen accents used
for indicating tones, I just wanted to add that when 100% ASCII
compatibility is required, using accents wouldn't be possible either - and
English keyboards AFAIK, there are no accent keys anyway.
>
> 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.
>
Agree. But I guess there's no other possiblity. And as has been said
somewhere on this list before, Sampa is not thought to look nice, but merely
to be functional.
> > 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.
I forgot that.
> > > ¨ centralized (did not seem to be any reason not get rid of the
> > > underline)
> >
> > 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].
OK then. No real diacritics (Anyway, getting a "0" or something like that on
a letter with plain ASCII is absolutely impossible!). I'm so stupid
sometimes :(
> > 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.
:)
Carsten