Re: Phonetic Transcriptions

--- In cybalist@..., George S t a n a <gs001ns@...> wrote:

>
> >I think they made a mistake for Romanian. Instead of e_Xa for the
> >diphthong <ea>, I think they should have chosen Ea, and similarly I
> >think Oa would have been better than o_Xa for <oa>. Let the native
> >speakers decide.

> >The _X suffix means 'eXtra short';

> Oh, if _X is a sign to show that "ea" and "oa" are very short, then

it's okay! Indeed, "ea" and "oa" are as short as "ya" and "wa-wa".

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/romanian.htm calls them
semivowels. My thought was merely that I'd rather type 'Ea'
the 'e_Xa', and that I'd seen these very short vowels recorded as low
vowels in the Rosetta Project's entry for Romanian.

> >Finally, there's the issue of schwa, which causes Yahoo groups to
> >mangle words containing them. The quick and dirty solution is to

use &.

> Yes, sir! :) OTOH, in Romanian examples, "ã" is always to be read
> as a Schwa. (In Romanian all vowels are "short", so is "ã".)

> >so that the pronunciation of mãr is
> >written /m&\r/.

> What's the significance of this slash "\"?

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/ipasam-x.pdf uses '\' to double
the number of avaiable characters, so that '3' and '3\' are
effectively different characters. '&\' is not alocated, but it
allocates '&' to the open front rounded vowel written as a 'small
capital' Œ, as opposed to the open-mid front rounded vowel œ, for
which it proposes 9. SAMPA sticks to pukka, 7-bit ASCII, while I
think the list-server and our browsers can handle most 8-bit codes,
e.g. the two foregoing 'oe' ligatures.

Richard.