ASCII IPA?

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On Fri, Feb 22, 2008 at 6:44 PM, Tom Zurinskas <truespel at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>  Below is from alt.usage.english  http://alt-usage-english.org/ipa/nutshell.shtml
>  which is a "contact" of the American Dialect Society from page
> http://www.americandialect.org/index.php/amerdial/contact/ of the ADS site.
>
>  My questions are: What is ASCII IPA?  Is it an ADS standard?  Is it the same as
> SAMPA?  Is it an American standard?  Is it gov. adopted or approved?

As the AUE pages explain, this is an ASCII transcription system for
IPA, as developed by AUE contributor Evan Kirshenbaum. The full
specification is here:

http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/ascii-ipa.pdf

Kirshenbaum's system differs in many ways from SAMPA, as can be seen
from Don Blaheta's comparison of the five most common ASCII
representations of IPA:

http://www.blahedo.org/ascii-ipa.html

You might recall that I posted this link in a thread here a month ago.

--Ben Zimmer

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