Re: X-SAMPA { and }

At 12:38 PM +0000 11/07/01, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>X-SAMPA is a standard.
>
>Some people here may not like a few details in it, but if you go
>changing standards just because you think you are clever, you're on
>the slippery slope that leads to MicroSoft(R) TCP/IP(TM) and other
>abominations.
>
>And who among the let's-gratuitously-fiddle-with-X-SAMPA gang has
>upped and produced reference materials for their version that are as
>useful as John Wells' writeup or Andrew Mutchler's annotated chart?
Well, for my purposes the transcription scheme I've come up with for
Tepa is much more useful than X-SAMPA or any of the other IPA-ASCII
schemes I've seen. That's why I use it instead of something else.

I am also in fairly regular correspondence with other Numicists, and
we have a transcription scheme for Numic languages which is much more
useful than any of the IPA-ASCII schemes. That's why we use it
instead of something else.

While I agree with the sentiment regarding standards, It's just not
that simple an issue when it comes to practical problems in
transcription. What are you transcribing? What is the intended
audience? What is the purpose of the transcription? The answers to
these and similar questions will dictate the kind of transcription
system which is optimal for your purposes. You just can't expect a
single scheme to be sufficient for all purposes. This applies equally
to the alphabet of the IPA as well as to any ASCII representations of
it.

Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga                              Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu

"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead;
therefore we must learn both arts."            - Thomas Carlyle

Reply