Usenet ASCII-IPA transcription


ASCII-IPA or erkIPA is a transliteration system used to represent the International Phonetic Alphabet in ASCII, in order to allow typewriting IPA symbols with a regular keyboard. It was developed for Usenet, notably the newsgroups sci.lang and alt.usage.english. It is sometimes called Kirshenbaum notation or even Kirshenbaum, after Evan Kirshenbaum, who led the collaboration that created it, and the Kirshenbaum specification that defines it. The eSpeak open source software speech synthesizer uses this ASCII-IPA scheme.
WWW kirshenbaum.net/IPA/ascii...

Comparison of Usenet ASCII-IPA with X-SAMPA

ASCII-IPA uses almost all lower-case letters to represent the directly corresponding IPA character, but unlike X-SAMPA, has the notable exception of the letter 'r'. A non-comprehensive list of sounds where the two systems use different characters:
SoundIPAX-SAMPAUsenet
alveolar trillrr<trl>
alveolar approximantr\r
near-open front unrounded vowel

ASCII-IPA charts of consonants and vowels

''This chart is based on information provided in the Kirshenbaum specification. It may also be helpful to compare it to the SAMPA chart or X-SAMPA chart ~ see Comparison of ASCII encodings of the International Phonetic Alphabet.''

Consonant chart

The IPA consonant chart, for comparison, uses many symbols that are less widely supported:

Vowel chart

The IPA vowel chart, by comparison, uses many symbols that are less widely supported:

Vowel modifiers and diacritics

Modifiers and diacritics follow the symbol they modify.
Modifier/diacriticMeaning
~Nasalized
:Long
-Unrounded
.Rounded
"Centralized
<?>Murmured
<r>Rhoticized

Stress is indicated by ' for primary stress, and , for secondary stress, placed before the stressed syllable.

Background

The ASCII-IPA system started developing in August 1992 through a usenet group, after "being fed up with describing the sound of words by using other words".
It should be usable for both phonemic and narrow phonetic transcription.
  • It should be possible to represent all symbols and diacritics in the IPA.
  • The previous guideline notwithstanding, it is expected that most use will be in transcribing English, so where tradeoffs are necessary, decisions should be made in favor of ease of representation of phonemes which are common in English.
  • The representation should be readable.
  • It should be possible to mechanically translate from the representation to a character set which includes IPA. The reverse would also be nice.
The developers decided to use the existing IPA alphabet, mapping each segment to a single keyboard character, and adding extra ASCII characters optionally for IPA diacritics.
An early, different set in ASCII was derived from the pronunciation guide in Merriam-Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, which uses straight letters to describe the sound.
Kirshenbaum's document, Representing IPA phonetics in ASCII, is commonly used as an example of an "IPA ASCII" system.
The eSpeak software speech synthesizer uses the ASCII-IPA scheme to represent phonemes with ASCII characters.

Encoding

IETF language tags have registered as a variant subtag identifying text as transcribed in this convention.