Nicholas Bodley scripsit:

> Both points taken. Which of the two ASCII IPA's is preferred on Qalam?

Neither as yet, AFAIK.

Structurally, Kirshenbaum is quite different from SAMPA, its extended for
X-SAMPA, and X-SAMPA's slight variant CXS. Kirshenbaum is essentially a
featural alphabet (hey! on-topic!) with abbreviations for common cases:
thus [<low><bck><unr><vwl>] and [A] mean the same thing, a low back
unrounded vowel (my "a" in "father").

The SAMPA family mirror the structure of the IPA itself, using ASCII
characters for (most of) the base characters of the IPA, and various
conventions for IPA diacritics[*]. So [A] in these conventions means
specifically the script-a of IPA, which indeed represents a low back
unrounded vowel.

I used to use Kirshenbaum, but now use CXS, which differs from X-SAMPA
mostly in using [&] for ae-digraph (borrowed from Kirshenbaum) instead of
the anti-mnemonic [{], and ' instead of " for primary stress and " instead
of % for secondary stress. There are a few other differences of detail.

For people who already know the IPA, an IPA chart with blue CXS
annotations is at http://cassowary.free.fr/Linguistics/cxschart.png .

[*] Implosiveness and clickness are treated as diacritics; following \
doubles the size of the ASCII alphabet (B is beta, B\ is small capital
B, e.g.)

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