On Fri, 25 Jun 1999 22:54:49 -0500, Nik Taylor <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Herman Miller wrote:
>> Where can I find a description of the CB system?
>
>Right here:
>http://www.cs.brown.edu/~dpb/ascii-ipa.html
>But, it's only a list, it doesn't describe the system, but I'm sure you
>could figure it out.  The author of the system posted it to our list a
>while back, so it's probably also in the archives.

Thanks.

>> Tones are a bit awkward, but none of the ASCII-IPA systems
>> I've seen handles tones well
>
>Are you including those that use numbers, like /i42/?  I don't see that
>as all that bad.

Branner's system appears to be the most complete, but it unfortunately =
uses
the / character, which I ultimately abandoned becuase of its use to =
delimit
phonemic transcriptions. Considering the compromises that necessarily go
into designing an ASCII representation, that's probably good enough,
although it would be nice to have a general "falling tone" or "rising =
tone"
symbol without having to refer to specific pitches. After I uploaded my
page yesterday, I realized that I could use the superscripts ^^ and ^v =
for
falling and rising tones. I also rearranged some of the diacritics to =
allow
the other IPA diacritics for tones: ^=3D ^` ^- ^' ^" (from low to high).

I played around with the vowel layout some more and came up with a better
arrangement, which avoids the arbitrary symbols $ and % (although I =
noticed
that the CB system also uses % for slashed o!)

Vowels   Front     Central    Back
Close    i  y       i" u"     U" u
              I  Y          U
Close-mid   e  o"     @" 8    O" o
                        @
Open-mid       E  e"   E* 8"  V  O
                &        a*
Open              a  E"       A  A*

=46inally, I expanded KPA to include a few symbols that aren't in the IPA
chart, such as the characters for Chinese vowels, and added a sorted list
of KPA symbols with their Unicode equivalents if I could find them. If
anyone can think of any useful symbols I left out (there are a lot of
apparently redundant or disused symbols), please let me know and I'll try
to figure out a way to add them.

http://www.io.com/~hmiller/kpa.html

--
languages of Kolagia---> =
+---<http://www.io.com/~hmiller/languages.html>---
      Thryomanes        /"If all Printers were determin'd not to print =
any
   (Herman Miller)     / thing till they were sure it would offend no =
body,
   moc.oi @ rellimh <-/  there would be very little printed." -Ben =
Franklin