Re: Idea for a new ASCII-IPA scheme

On Thu, 24 Jun 1999 08:25:46 -0500, Carlos Thompson
<carlos_thompson@...> wrote:

>Nik wrote:
>
>> While D looks nothing like edh, V bares only a slight resemblance to
>> carat, @ has no resemblance to schwa, and & has no resemblance to ash =
-
>> in fact, the only reason I can see for that is that "and" has an ash, =
at
>> least in my dialect, and presumably that of the inventor.
>
>Well.  Actually in SAMPA, the symbol for the almost wide open frontal =
vowel
>(IPA ae ligature or ash) is {, the & symbol is from Kirchenbaum(sp?)... =
but
>I agree is more used, and more clear in my opinion, & than {.
>
>-- Carlos Th
That { symbol is one of the things I specifically dislike about SAMPA. In
general the SAMPA vowels aren't very clear to me; 6 would have been =
better
for "turned script a" than the infrequently used "turned a", and 2 for
"slashed o" is just weird. (I'd prefer using 0 for "slashed o", but it
could get confused with O, and who these days remembers that zero used to
be slashed? At least % gets across the idea of "circle+slash" even though
it doesn't look much like a letter of the alphabet.....)

I think Kirshenbaum's system was one of the first to use & for (ae), but
I've seen it in other systems, and it's what everyone seems to use. As =
for
@ resembling schwa, it may not look much like it in a standard font, but =
it
may have looked more like schwa in one of the old 5x7 bitmapped text =
fonts.

--
languages of Kolagia---> =
+---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/languages.html>---
      Thryomanes        /"If all Printers were determin'd not to print =
any
   (Herman Miller)     / thing till they were sure it would offend no =
body,
   moc.oi @ rellimh <-/  there would be very little printed." -Ben =
Franklin