X-SAMPA

X-SAMPA 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 a basis for an input method for IPA.

History

SAMPA was developed in the late 1980s in the European Commission-funded ESPRIT project 2589 "Speech Assessment Methods" (SAM)—hence "SAM Phonetic Alphabet"—in order to facilitate email data exchange and computational processing of transcriptions in phonetics and speech technology. As many symbols as possible were taken over from the IPA; where this is not possible, other signs that are available were used, e.g. [@] for schwa (IPA ), [2] for (the vowel sound found in French deux ('two')), and [9] for (the vowel sound found in French neuf ('nine')).

SAMPA, as originally standardized, is a partial encoding of the IPA. The first version of SAMPA was the union of the sets of phoneme codes for Danish, Dutch, English, French, German and Italian; later versions extended SAMPA to cover other European languages. Since SAMPA is based on phoneme inventories, each SAMPA table is valid only in the language it was created for. In order to make this IPA encoding technique universally applicable, X-SAMPA was developed, which provides one single table without language-specific differences.

Language-specific SAMPA representations have been developed for the sounds of the following languages:

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Notation

X-SAMPA uses the ASCII notation below for IPA representation.

The IPA symbols that are ordinary lower case letters have the same value in X-SAMPA as they do in the IPA.
X-SAMPA uses backslashes as modifying suffixes to create new symbols. For example, s is a distinct sound from s\, which are phonologically related in many ways. Such use of the backslash character can be a problem, since many programs interpret it as an escape character for the character following it. For example, such X-SAMPA symbols do not work in EMU, so backslashes must be replaced with some other symbol (e.g., an asterisk: '*') when adding phonemic transcription to an EMU speech database. The backslash has no fixed meaning.
X-SAMPA uses the underscore character to join following diacritics to the symbols they modify, except for ~ (nasalization), = (syllabicity), and ` (retroflexion and rhotacization), for which the underscore is optional.
The underscore character is also used to encode the IPA tiebar: k_p codes for .
The numbers _1 to _6 are reserved diacritics as shorthand for language-specific tone numbers.
The IETF language tags registry has assigned fonxsamp as the subtag for text transcribed in X-SAMPA.

Lower-case symbols

Upper-case symbols

Other symbols

Diacritics

SAMPROSA

The SAM PROSodic Alphabet (SAMPROSA) is a system for prosodic transcription, developed by Dafydd Gibbon, Daniel J. Hirst, and William J. Barry as part of the SAM Prosody Working Group. SAMPROSA is composed of the prosodic symbols of SAMPA along with a SAM System for Intonation Transcription (SAMSINT). There is some overlap between the segmental symbols of SAMPA and the prosodic symbols of SAMPROSA, however, and so X-SAMPA separates out SAMPROSA notation from SAMPA by the use of the < and > tier escape symbols. The IPA's alternative way of encoding tones (ȅ, e̋, etc) also derives from the same SAMPROSA notational system: using B,L,M,H,T; R,F following a _.

Prosodic symbols and diacritics

Such tone letters as above are represented in Unicode through combining modifier characters rendered as ligatures. For example, ˧˥ (<HT>) is represented by ˧ (<H>) and ˥ (<T>) directly adjacent, with no separating space. Occasionally, language-specific tone numbers (<1>, <2>, etc) are used instead of their explicit counterparts (eg. <TT>, <M>), but such usage across languages is not standardized as a part of X-SAMPA.

Charts

Consonants

Asterisks (*) mark sounds that do not have X-SAMPA symbols. Daggers (†) mark IPA symbols that have recently been added to Unicode. Since April 2008, the latter is the case of the labiodental flap, symbolized by a right-hook v in the IPA: . A convention for the labiodental flap does not yet exist in X-SAMPA.