Nicholas Bodley wrote:

> While discussing pronunciations, until that glorious day when
> the IPA is available to most Qalamites for routine Unicode
> e-mail, is there an accepted standard for ASCII equivalents?

The most common conventions are SAMPA and Kirshenbaum's:

http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/home.htm
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Evan_Kirshenbaum/IPA/faq.html

They are bases on the same basic principle (using capital letters to
represent non-ASCII symbols), but differ in several details, the most
notable being the main stress sign, which is ["] in SAMPA and ['] in
Kirshenbaum's notation.

_ Marco