Re: X-SAMPA { and }

> Date:         Thu, 8 Nov 2001 01:38:31 +0100
> From: =?iso-8859-1?Q?J=F6rg?= Rhiemeier <joerg.rhiemeier@...>
>
> Lars Henrik Mathiesen <thorinn@...> writes:
>
> > I'm not talking about using another system if X-SAMPA doesn't suit
> > your needs --- noone can object to that.
>
> No.  For example, I find that X-SAMPA doesn't suit my needs when I am
> going to present phonological data in e-mails (whether in CONLANG or
> in private communication with friends) or on web pages, and thus
> I don't use it.  After all, this application is AFAIK not what
> X-SAMPA was made for anyway.
Quoting from <URL:http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/x-sampa.htm>:

    Using these codes, you can for example include IPA-phonetic
    transcriptions of all kinds in e-mail messages or other forms of
    electronic exchange. Wherever an IPA character set is not
    available, X-SAMPA will provide a workable alternative.

Straight from the keyboard of the designer. (It's not like that page
is hard to locate, it's the first one Google finds when you search for
X-SAMPA).

> X-SAMPA is intended to be converted into actual IPA *automatically*,
> or so I am told.
It would be quite simple to do so, since the designer has in fact
understood how to make a easily parsable code. (There's a nit or two,
like the _ marking either diacritics or a tie bar, but there's no
guesswork involved).

But there doesn't seem to be anything out there to do so now.

Once I get something installed on my home system (FreeBSD 4.3) that
will actually attempt to place random Unicode diacritics on IPA base
characters, I fully intend to code up a perl script to convert between
X-SAMPA and Unicode IPA.

Which is one reason I'm arguing so hard for using the standard version
of X-SAMPA: I don't want people complaining to me that they get small
caps OE's instead of 

Reply