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Usenet ASCII-IPA transcription

System for representing the International Phonetic Alphabet in ASCII format

Summary

System for representing the International Phonetic Alphabet in ASCII format

ASCII-IPA or erkIPA is a transliteration system used to represent the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in ASCII, in order to allow typewriting IPA symbols with a regular keyboard. It was developed for Usenet, notably the newsgroups sci.lang and alt.usage.english. It is sometimes called Kirshenbaum notation or even Kirshenbaum , after Evan Kirshenbaum, who led the collaboration that created it, and the Kirshenbaum specification that defines it. The eSpeak open source software speech synthesizer uses this ASCII-IPA scheme.

Comparison of Usenet ASCII-IPA with X-SAMPA

ASCII-IPA uses almost all lower-case letters to represent the directly corresponding IPA character, but unlike X-SAMPA, has the notable exception of the letter 'r'. A non-comprehensive list of sounds where the two systems use different characters:

Sound	X-SAMPA	Usenet
alveolar trill	`r`	`r`
alveolar approximant	`r\`	`r`
near-open front unrounded vowel	`{`	`&`
open back rounded vowel	`Q`	`A.`
open-mid central unrounded vowel	`3`	`V"`
primary stress	`"`	`'`
secondary stress	`%`	`,`

ASCII-IPA charts of consonants and vowels

This chart is based on information provided in the Kirshenbaum specification. It may also be helpful to compare it to the SAMPA chart or X-SAMPA chart ~ see Comparison of ASCII encodings of the International Phonetic Alphabet.

Consonant chart

Labial	Coronal	Dorsal	Laryngeal	Alveolar laterals	Bilabial	Labio‐
dental	Dental	Alveolar	Retro‐
flex	Palato‐
alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Uvular	Labio‐
velar	Pharyn‐
geal	Glottal	Nasals	Stops	Fricatives	Approximants	Laterals	Trills	Flaps	Ejectives	Implosives	Clicks
Place of articulation →
Manner of articulation ↓
`m`	`M`	`n[`	`n`	`n.`		`n^`	`N`	`n"`	`n`
`p b`		`t[ d[`	`t d`	`t. d. `		`c J`	`k g`	`q G`	`t d`		`?`
`P B`	`f v`	`T D`	`s z`	`s. z.`	`S Z`	`C C`	`x Q`	`X g"`	`w w`	`H H`	`h`	`s z`
	`r`	`r[`	`r`	`r.`		`j`	`j`	`g"`	`w`		`h`
		`l[`	`l`	`l.`		`l^`	`L`
`b`			`r`					`r"`
			` *`	` *.`								`*`
`p``		`t[``	`t``			`c``	`k``	`q``
`b``		`d``	`d``			`J``	`g``	`G``
`p!`		`t!`	c!}} to IPA , which some people used indifferently for both alveolar and palatal clicks.			`c!`	`k!`					`l!`

The IPA consonant chart, for comparison, uses many symbols that are less widely supported:

Vowel chart

Front	Central	Back	Rhotic
Close	`i y`	`i" u"`	`u- u`
Near-close	`I I.`		`(U-) U`
Close-mid	`e Y`	`@ @.`	`o- o`
Mid		`@`
Open-mid	`E W`	`V" O"`	`V O`
Near-open	`&`	`&"`	(no symbols)
Open	`a a.`	`(a" A".)`	`A A.`

The IPA vowel chart, by comparison, uses many symbols that are less widely supported:

Vowel modifiers and diacritics

Modifiers and diacritics follow the symbol they modify.

Modifier/diacritic	Meaning
`~`	Nasalized
`:`	Long
`-`	Unrounded
`.`	Rounded
`"`	Centralized
``	Murmured
``	Rhoticized

Stress is indicated by ' for primary stress, and , for secondary stress, placed before the stressed syllable.

Background

The ASCII-IPA system started developing in August 1992 through a usenet group, after "being fed up with describing the sound of words by using other words". It should be usable for both phonemic and narrow phonetic transcription.

It should be possible to represent all symbols and diacritics in the IPA.
The previous guideline notwithstanding, it is expected that (as in the past) most use will be in transcribing English, so where tradeoffs are necessary, decisions should be made in favor of ease of representation of phonemes which are common in English.
The representation should be readable.
It should be possible to mechanically translate from the representation to a character set which includes IPA. The reverse would also be nice.

The developers decided to use the existing IPA alphabet, mapping each segment to a single keyboard character, and adding extra ASCII characters optionally for IPA diacritics.

An early (1993), different set in ASCII was derived from the pronunciation guide in Merriam-Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, which uses straight letters to describe the sound.

Kirshenbaum's document, Representing IPA phonetics in ASCII, is commonly used as an example of an "IPA ASCII" system.

The eSpeak software speech synthesizer uses the ASCII-IPA scheme to represent phonemes with ASCII characters.

Encoding

IETF language tags have registered as a variant subtag identifying text as transcribed in this convention.

References

Kirshenbaum, Evan. "Hewlett Packard Labs".
(2018). "The Unicode Cookbook for Linguistics". Language Science Press.
Kirshenbaum, Evan. "Usenet IPA/ASCII transcription".
Kirshenbaum, Evan. (2011-09-06). "Representing IPA phonetics in ASCII".
Kirshenbaum, Evan. "FAQ: Summary of IPA/ASCII transcription for English".
Korpela, Jukka K.. (28 June 2006). "Unicode Explained". O'Reilly Media.
(26 July 2007). "Latin to Speech".
(2021-03-05). "Language Subtag Registry". IANA.

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

phonetic-alphabets ascii international-phonetic-alphabet

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