Re: More ASCII IPA suggestions

Andreas Answered;
> You could always use [^*] for mid-centralizing and
> consign the backslash to oblivion, or use \ as a less
> confusable alternative to ` -- cf. the typo-problem above
> and the fact that people tend to mix up ` and '!
...and...

> I've grown rather attached to ` for retroflexes, but I of course agree
it's
> not problem-free.
Barbara Babbles;
in CB with its 'visualization-phoneme-pronunciation syntax for multi
character graphemes had different solutions.

anything that followed ^ was a superscript or over-diacritic and not a
phoneme so "x" after "^" was the mid centralized diacritic in that position
and not the velar fricative: EG;

/e^x/ = mid centralized /e/

For retroflex we took a cue from the IPA; every phoneme in the Retroflex
column was a character from the Alveolar column with a rightward hooked
extended stem or leg, so to "retroflex" a phoneme all we needed was a
pronunciation symbol. we chose "<" because the easy mnemonic was the
leftward chevron points *against* (retro)  the direction of reading, and it
was "open" to the right as the IPA "hook" was. so the entire alveolar and
retroflex equivalents sequence were;

t  d   to  t< d< ,  n  to   n< ,  r   to r< , ;r  to   ;r<
(" ; " meant  "imagine character upside down" to 'see' the IPA one)
s  z  to  s< z< , l  to  l< , and  t'  to  t'<

Just a different solution ;-). But we too loathed the backslash and grave.
The backslash because it interrupted the flow of reading too much, and the
grave because in too many faces/fonts it simply was too small - easy to
mistake for the font's apostrophe - or even miss altogether.

One problem we never cracked was how to always differentiate the capitol I
from the lower case l and the number 1 regardless of the typeface used by
the viewer because in some sans serif typefaces these characters are
indistinguishable. All we could come up with was the rather clunky
prescriptive that CB should always be written and read in a Serif typeface!
We were not happy about that, but it was all we could come up with :-(

Barbara