Re: X-SAMPA { and }

At 7:59 PM +0000 11/07/01, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>  > Date: Wed, 07 Nov 2001 09:50:57 -0700
>>  From: Dirk Elzinga <Dirk_Elzinga@...>
>>
>>  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'm not talking about using another system if X-SAMPA doesn't suit
>your needs --- noone can object to that.
>
>I'm talking about people who find that X-SAMPA is exactly what they
>need, except that it would look so much nicer if we just made this
>teeny little change, the use of which will of course be intuitively
>obvious to everyone seeing the transcription.
>
>So next week we make another undocumented change to suit our innately
>superior aesthetics, and the world will be a better place for it. Or?
I agree. When people alter a standard *without documenting the
alterations* they leave themselves open to the kind of criticism you
offer. I'm glad you made that qualification clear. I have no problem
with people who want to tweak an existing system, as long as they
tell me what they've done.

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

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