Talk:SAMPA chart

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(* Somebody help here: The d in spanish cada does not correspond to the ð, although many people believe it does. It is represented by đ, but I don't know if the SAMPA has a symbol for it.) -- Added at 15:02, 5 Jul 2003 by 216.72.48.40, moved here from article page

Well there are always conflicting ways to analyze the phonology of a language but for broad/phonemic transcriptions, the simplest (or more "romanic") symbols are generally preferred. For narrow/phonetic transcriptions, the full hoard of symbols should be used. All the Spanish dictionaries I know which have IPA symbols reflect pretty closes what SAMPA uses. Hippietrail 06:40, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

OK, it says to pronounce [U] like the letter "u" in "put" and "Buddhist". I do NOT say "put" with the same vowel sound as in "Buddhist". So which one is it? What's up with that guide? Wiwaxia 11:58, 2 Sep 2003 (UTC)

  • Probably 'put'. However, the guidelines are only guidelines; the sensibler thing to do is to find sound files and listen to the sound that is [U] and see if it's either 'put' or 'Buddhist' or neither. In my English, for instance, I have [u] in 'put' and 'Buddist' and a diphthong ending somewhere round [}] for 'boot', and [U] often sounds like [y] or [@] to me. Kesuari 3.03, 3 Jan 2003 (UTC).
Perhaps "soot" and "suit" better illustrate the difference in these phonemes though I notice that Scottish English at least merges the two. Hippietrail 06:40, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)

If I decyphered IPA/SAMPA right, then some hungarian examples:

  • c - hungarian tyúk (hen), approximately english t+y
  • J\ - hungarian egy (one), approximately englisg d+y

Not that it possibly helps too much for english speakers ;-) --grin 21:42, 8 Sep 2003 (UTC)

Um, problem. Someone could point me to the source of the IPA c in SAMPA? Seems that I have problem with defining these:

&#29d; = j\ (jj) = Voiced palatal fricative = Spanish yate, ayuda

Ġ = t' = voiceless retroflex plosive (SAMPA), voiceless retroflex stop (Unicode) ???

Ā = d' = voiced retroflex plosive (SAMPA) / v. r. stop (Unicode)

c = (voiceless palatal stop - wikipedia sampa chart) haven't found on SAMPA website

As far as I see stop not equals to fricative in theory.

SAMPA website tells hungarian ty and gy as t' and d', other sources (inclunding me in SAMPA chart) as c and J\. Who's right? --grin 16:45, 24 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I think this page needs to be reworked to be more user-friendly. It took me ages to find how to write the bon sound from French, it's a bit confusing having some things in charts, and others scattered around in various footnotes. Also, i is supposed to represent the sound in the English see, but higher up the page it says that the long e sound of ee is represented by adding a colon to the i, so see is actually written [si:] - the chart seems a bit misleading in that case. Remember that people who aren't familiar with phonetics are going to come to this page to decode pronunciations guides they find in wikipedia articles.

Some suggestions (I don't know enough to do these myself, by the way):

  1. to help those who know the IPA it might be a good idea to have an image file of each IPA character as well as the unicode symbol; even if people have installed a unicode font on their own computer, they might acess these pages from school/work/internet cafes etc
  2. in the charts the example words should all be written out in SAMPA as well as English/whatever language they come from - this will make things as clear as possible and give people lots of examples of how whole words are represented in SAMPA, they will become more familiar with the notations for syllabic stress etc, which are otherwise relegated to a footnote
  3. there should be a balance struck between the needs of the linguist and the needs of the person who's followed a link in an article next to a pronunciation guide... the chart shouldn't be dumbed down, but organised to be as clear and easy to use as possible (especially with regard to symbols like : ~ " = etc)
  4. it would be wonderful if we could get a sound file for each example word (from a native speaker), though I have no idea how we'd organise collecting these

fabiform | talk 14:03, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

3) Symbology is never obvious in another's POV. An English speaker who is "dumb" (as you say) will never be used to the fact that y is symbolized as [j] (it being German and Dutch).
4) This may not be possible. IPA is used arbitrarily sometimes. [y] in French (spelled u) and German (spelled ü) doesn't really sound like Mandarin [y] (spelled ü). The later being less [u] to my ears. And these symbols have never been otherwise in those languages. The Latino [t] are more alveolar, I think hence their "talk" sounds like "dolk". Oh yeah... and the Chinese 'h' [x], as in hai (sea), sounds barely like German [x], as in Bach.
--Menchi 17:30, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

3) I hope you don't think I was calling any users of these charts "dumb", that's not what the phrase implies. And since I said it took me five minutes to find bon, I was necessarily including myself in the category of the user who's stumbled on to the page.  :) What I meant was that the page is a little intimidating as it stands. I opened it and saw the top chart which starts with "Bilabial Labiodentals Dentals Alveolars Postalveolars Palatals Velars Uvulars Pharyngeals Glottals" and thought "eek". There could be a more gentle introduction.
4) So you're saying that each SAMPA symbol represents a subtle range of sounds from language to language? All the more reason in that case to have sound files if possible so that people who don't know a wide range of languages have the chance to discover this for themselves. fabiform | talk 20:16, 9 Feb 2004 (UTC)

4) Maybe not all symbols have a range, but basically, yes, that is why there are a buncha diacritic marks in official IPA, like circles and squares and smiley faces. But they are only necessary if you are doing comparative linguistics, which is useless in language teaching. Like when I learned English, we only learned English's IPA (KK system). But when I learned French (from English), we only barely learned French's IPA. I think audiologists and speech therapists regularly use the detailed transcription though. By a subtle range, it means that as long as you fit into that certain region/area in the mouth, you got yourself a label.
Try SIL IPA IPA Help. It has clear recordings by native speakers of most symbols. It even has those famous ejectives ("explosion of air in mouth"). You'll have lotsa fun with it. Trust me. --Menchi 02:15, 10 Feb 2004 (UTC)

This page really shouldn't exist. SAMPA defines encodings for individual languages, not all of which are compatible with each other... that is to say, not all of which can be put on a chart on one page like this.

For a general ASCIIfication of the entire IPA, X-SAMPA should be used. -Muke Tever 18:53, 24 Feb 2004 (UTC)

Good point. I think many didn't realize that SAMPA is language-specific. I didn't. --Menchi 07:49, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I think sometimes "SAMPA" is used to refer to X-SAMPA also, so this is understandable, but as an encyclopedia I think we want to be more accurate. --Muke Tever 16:20, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I ain't no linguists and never heard of SAMPA before Wikipedia, but it seemed to be a good idea; seemed to be an accepted, standard way to describe phonetics in ASCII. Seems I was mislead. If you believe X-SAMPA could be that ultimate tool to describe pronounciation then maybe you should create an article on it. I cannot judge how much support/backing does it have from scientific/linguistic community. We - as an international encyclopedia - definitely and deperately need a standard way to describe pronounciation without (along to) using IPA, since IPA characters are rarely supported by default installs of systems. I'd support whatever ultimate standard you come up with. ;-> I see no problem in copying SAMPA article(s) to X-SAMPA and start updating them. --grin 09:24, 2004 Feb 25 (UTC)
The several (amateur) linguistics mailing lists I subscribe to use X-SAMPA (and minor variants thereof) for general phonetic and phonemic representation. My understanding is that the community on Usenet mainly uses the Kirshenbaum system. I'll get started on an article for X-SAMPA today. --Muke Tever 16:20, 25 Feb 2004 (UTC)
I put in X-SAMPA. It is somewhat weak as an article, but hopefully complete as far as symbols go. --Muke Tever 07:38, 1 Mar 2004 (UTC)
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