Phonetic representation

2

For pronunciation questions it is often useful to be able to properly represent the sounds; unfortunately using the proper IPA characters is not feasible. Should we agree on a standard way to do this? One common option is SAMPA, http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/index.html, but there are undoubtedly also others.

SAMPA basically consists of a mapping of symbols of the International Phonetic Alphabet onto ASCII codes in the range 33..127, the 7-bit printable ASCII characters.

asked 2016-09-14T11:33:38.940

Oliver Mason

1 858

1 Why do you say that IPA is not feasible? It is readibly available in Unicode and it's easy enough to copy the characters from Wikipedia. – Neil Roberts – 2016-09-16T10:55:12.320

1 It is too difficult to enter them quickly in my opinion. We already have problems with the Esperanto characters... – Oliver Mason – 2016-09-16T11:43:21.583

Answers

1

It seems odd to go from Esperanto phonology, which is very restricted, to a much larger phonological system that people won't always know. The ideal, I think, would be to be able to supply recordings, for example, by providing a relevant link to

http://forvo.com/

so if someone asks "how do you pronounce homoj" the answer might be to give a link

http://forvo.com/word/homoj/#eo

and to add the pronounciation if it isn't already there.

asked 2016-09-14T11:33:38.940

conor

1 317

SAMPA is pretty much a standard for expressing pronunciations. It's much better than not having any system, just because people won't know it. Recordings are tricky IMO, as one might not be in a position to listen to them. Much better if you can just write /homOI/ which clearly expresses how it would sound. – Oliver Mason – 2016-09-15T10:07:02.967

1 That might be a linguists perspective! I was just trying to suggest that those who know SAMPA would probably have no problem with Esperanto phonology as it stands. – conor – 2016-09-15T11:33:08.763

But the problem seems to me to be that those who do not know it have difficulties expressing pronunciations properly in (mostly English?) equivalents (I have seen "ch-ee-o" recently) which doesn't really help much. So by suggesting to use SAMPA, that might be solved. Or am I being too optimistic? – Oliver Mason – 2016-09-15T11:53:43.863

I agree that SAMPA is a nice alternative, I like that it uses ASCII. Is there a table with the SAMPA <-> Esperanto equivalence? (I realize that this is deducible from the IPA table given eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto_orthography) - actually I will ask this as a question and then if you don't answer I will answer it myself when I get home.

– conor – 2016-09-15T13:41:44.080

asked: 2016-09-14T11:33:38.940

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active: 2016-09-15T11:30:44.830