IPA-to-ASCII conversion systems
Although IPA symbols are supposed to be an international standard for representing pronunications,
they are a great hindrance in Internet usage because many IPA symbols cannot be written with ASCII
characters (the characters found on conventional keyboards).
Some attempts to standardize a set of ASCII symbols for phonetics are shown below.
SAMPA
The SAMPA (Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet)
system seems to be the most standard conversion system,
and has the most complete documentation, such as at:
http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/home.htm (10-24-04)
http://www.michael-forman.com/language/phonetics.html (10-21-04)
Therefore the SAMPA system is the system used on this site,
except for the following symbol substitutions:
SAMPA
symbol
| modified
SAMPA
symbol
used
here
|
| a~
| A~
|
| e~
| E~
|
| o~
| O~
|
My reason for this slight modification is that SAMPA is inconsistent on nasalized vowel sounds,
since:
- When /A/ is nasalized it should be notated /A~/, but SAMPA represents it as /a~/.
- When /E/ is nasalized it should be notated /E~/, but SAMPA represents it as /e~/.
- When /O/ is nasalized it should be notated /O~/, but SAMPA represents it as /o~/.
The Collins-Robert French-English dictionary that I use for most of the phonetic
descriptions on this site does not show any such shift in the sound
that would be implied by making the letters lower case,
since it uses (the equivalent of) the same upper case letters when nasalized.
In addition, SAMPA is inconsistent because if SAMPA implies that the basic sounds shift
when nasalized, then SAMPA neglects to represent this fact in other sounds
it notates that are nasalized (viz., /i/, /9/).
Kirshenbaum's system
A technical article by Evan Kirshenbaum supposedly presents a complete conversion table:
http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/ascii-ipa.pdf (10-20-04)
Kirshenbaum's system mostly matches the SAMPA system,
but with the following exceptions that I've been able to detect:
SAMPA
symbol
| Kirshenbaum
symbol
|
| A
| a
|
| {
| &
|
Kirshenbaum also uses the epsilon sound /E/ for the American English sound /e/,
which seems to be just a matter of dispute between dictionaries.
Unfortunately, Kirshenbaum's article is very difficult to follow and
contains very limited examples,
so it would take great effort to determine his intended meanings.
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Updated: October 26, 2004
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