According to Wikipedia:<\/p>\r\n
\r\nThe Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (<\/a>) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at University College London. It is designed to unify the individual-language SAMPA alphabets, and extend SAMPA to cover the entire range of characters in the 1993 version of International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The result is a SAMPA-inspired remapping of the IPA into 7-bit ASCII.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
\u2026But what, you may ask, is SAMPA? Wikipedia to the rescue!<\/p>\r\n
\r\nSAMPA was devised as a hack to work around the inability of text encodings to represent IPA symbols. Later, as Unicode support for IPA symbols became more widespread, the necessity for a separate, computer-readable system for representing the IPA in ASCII decreased. However, X-SAMPA is still useful as the basis for an input method for true IPA.<\/p>\r\n<\/blockquote>\r\n
In other words, SAMPA was trying to solve the same problem as ASCII IPA<\/a>, a couple years later. (The original ASCII IPA page<\/a> was created in or before 1993.) I\u2019m not sure whether Wells just didn\u2019t know about ASCII IPA, or whether there was some other reason for creating SAMPA.<\/p>\r\n
I personally stopped using ASCII IPA a while ago, when the Unicode encodings for IPA symbols became easily findable online. It hadn\u2019t occurred to me until now (reading the X-SAMPA Wikipedia page quoted above) that ASCII IPA could still be useful as an input method for typing IPA, given a straightforward bit of software to change from one to the other.<\/p>\r\n
I\u2019ve never used X-SAMPA (nor SAMPA)\u2014I only heard of it for the first time sometime in the last year or so. I can\u2019t do a detailed comparison of X-SAMPA and ASCII IPA\u2014I don\u2019t know the former well enough, and it\u2019s been a long time since I\u2019ve used the latter. But it does look to me like Wells made a lot of the same representational choices that Kirshenbaum made; most of the English consonants and vowels are represented the same way in both systems.<\/p>\r\n
But there are some differences. For example, the English word trap<\/i> would be written in ASCII IPA as \/tr&p\/ (at least in my pronunciation), but in X-SAMPA as [tr\\{p].<\/p>\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[70],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pronunciation"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18775"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18775\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18776,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18775\/revisions\/18776"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/words\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}