I was thinking of something on those lines too. If you allocate each letter in IPA a two character code (2 is more than enough, 676); it could be randomly selected, but something intuitive is probably best. Then allocate each diacritic a two character code: can you use punctuation? Then you'd have;

YV!! for, say /y/ extra high tone
BB.. for /b/ breathy voiced

If you can't use punctuation, then just another two letter code;

YVeh
BBbv

(the change in case is just to make it look neat)

On 13 May 2011, at 02:49, Patrick Dunn <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> You could approach it differently, by creating digraphs (or better yet,
> trigraphs) that represent the location of the symbol in the IPA chart.  For
> example,
> 
> /t/ could be UAS for Unvoiced Alveolar Stop
> /c/ could be UPS for Unvoiced Palatal Stop
> /m/ could be VBN for Voiced Bilabial Nasal
> 
> and so on.
> 
> Since voicing in usually binary in most languages, you could reduce this to
> digraphs by swapping order for voicing, so
> 
> /t/ is AS
> /d/ is SA
> /k/ is VS
> /g/ is SV
> 
> it'd be pretty easy to come up with such a scheme for any one language or
> maybe a group of related languages.  If you wanted it to work with every
> single language, I doubt it'll be possible.  After all, there are some
> sounds that do not even fit neatly on an IPA chart, and every sound could
> conceivably be modified with diacritics.
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, May 12, 2011 at 7:58 PM, Herman Miller <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 
>> On 5/12/2011 11:21 AM, Peter Bleackley wrote:
>> 
>>> I'm trying to devise an ascii transcription of the IPA for use in the
>>> language recogniser I'm trying to create. Unfortunately, restrictions
>>> imposed by the speech recognition engine I'm using preclude the use of
>>> CXS for the purpose, so I'm having to roll my own. You can see my work
>>> so far on
>>> 
>>> http://code.google.com/p/spoken-language-recognition/wiki/PhoneticTranscription
>>> 
>>> 
>>> I'd appreciate any helpful feedback.
>>> 
>>> Pete
>>> 
>> 
>> Well, it's good to have some kind of systematic rules like your -R for
>> retroflex. Are you limited to 2-character symbols? Distinguishing between
>> the various "r" sounds could be tricky if so. But if you can use 3
>> characters, you could have e.g. RA for the alveolar approximant [ɹ], RAR for
>> the retroflex approximant [ɻ], RT for the alveolar tap [ɾ], and RTR for the
>> retroflex flap [ɽ].
>> 
>> Another convention that you might consider is doubling a letter for
>> representing small capital letters, e.g. GG for [ɢ], HH for [ʜ], RR for [ʀ],
>> YY for [ʏ].
>> 
>> One thing I don't like much is SD and ZD for the dental fricatives; [θ] and
>> [ð] are not much like [s] and [z], which are sibilants. I think TH and DH
>> would be more recognizable. Also for ease of recognition I'd use SH and ZH
>> for [ʃ], [ʒ].
>> 
>> How about the glottal stop?
>> 
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to
> window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance.  --Arthur Rimbaud