[Note: This would apply to
linguistics in general, not just IE-related.]
There are ASCII-based
phonetic transcription systems, the most popular (I've noticed) are Kirchenbaum
and SAMPA. Do a websearch for one of those, since I don't have a link
handy. These use upper and lowercase (therefore case sensitive), numerals
and punctuation; in some cases two or more characters have to be used to
describe one sound (lots of diacritics). The backslash is used in SAMPA to
represent inverted letters, small caps, etc.
It's pretty damned ugly, but
it's the best we can do with 7- or 8-bit text.
I actually use phonemic
notation for languages instead of phonetic. I define the segments before
hand, then just go from there. Digraphs and trigraphs are permitted as
long as there is some way to override the sequence for certain phonemes.
So "kh" in one language could be a voiceless aspirated velar stop; in others a
voiceless velar fricative. To distinguish ambiguity when "sh" means a
sequence of "s" and "h", a middle dot (used for Catalan double l to
distinguish from palatal l) is inserted, or in plain ASCII, a hyphen or
apostrophe. That is unless those aren't already used for something
else.
Albanian is a good example of
the use of digraphs. Many of these conventions were based on English
so there's another case.
For web purposes, there is
more to choose from than hex 20-FF if you have Win 95/NT 3.1 or later (don't
know what version of Macintosh began to work with two-byte characters).
There is an IPA allocation in Unicode. But not enough people use Unicode
fonts or even know what one is.
For an imaginary language of
mine, I use a mixture of Latin-1 and Greek and just switch between Times New
Roman and Symbol (where I get Greek letters) in an HTML (or .rtf or .doc)
document. The use of Greek letters is also practiced, incidentally, in
Americanist notation (which is mostly concerned with native American languages),
which uses the lambda for the voiceless lateral found in Welsh ll, delta for IPA
ð, and theta and gamma for the same purposes as IPA.
~DaW~
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, 03 September, 2001
14:31
Subject: Re: [tied] Vw again
--- fhb <fhb1999@...> escribió: >
---
"Y.C.M.T. Deroubaix"
>
> Do you think it wouldn't be
interesting to create a
> kind of simplified A.F.I. with digraphs like
th, kh,
> lh, nh, etc... instead of Greek or special symbols
>
A.F.I. has? It will be useful to unify
> transliterations,
understandable for non-specialized
> people and convenient for typing in
a computer.
>
> Yes, I know, the principle is "a sound, a
sign",
> but...
>
>
Oooops... A.F.I. = Alfabético
Fonético Internacional,
that is to say, International Phonetic
Alphabet
(I.P.A.?) Sorry.