Kirshenbaum

Kirshenbaum, sometimes called ASCII-IPA or erkIPA, is a system used to represent the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in ASCII. It was developed for Usenet, notably the newsgroups sci.lang and alt.usage.english. It is named after Evan Kirshenbaum, who led the collaboration that created it.

The system uses almost all lower-case letters to represent the directly corresponding IPA character, but unlike X-SAMPA has the notable exception of the letter 'r'. Examples where the two systems have a different mapping between characters and sounds are:

Kirshenbaum charts of consonants and vowels

"This chart is based on information provided in the Kirshenbaum specification. [http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/ascii-ipa.pdf] , [http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Evan_Kirshenbaum/IPA/faq.html] It may also be helpful to compare it to the SAMPA chart or X-SAMPA chart."

Consonant chart

Vowel chart

Kirshenbaum simplified chart of vowels "(the paired signs are unrounded/rounded vowels; symbols in parentheses designate vowels that exist in some spoken languages, but do not have IPA signs)"
	Front	Central	Back	Rhotic
Close	i y	i" u"	u- u
Near-close	I I.		(U-) U
Close-mid	e Y	@<umd> @.	o- o	R<umd>
Mid		@		R
Open-mid	E W	V" O"	V O
Near-open	&	&"	"(no symbols)"
Open	a a.	(a" A".)	A A.

Vowel modifiers and diacritics

Modifiers and diacritics follow the symbol they modify.

Modifier/diacritic	Meaning
~	Nasalized
:	Long
-	Unrounded
.	Rounded
"	Centralized
<?>	Murmured
<r>	Rhoticized

Stress is indicated by ' for primary stress, and , for secondary stress, placed before the stressed syllable.

ee also

*International Phonetic Alphabet
*SAMPA
*X-SAMPA
*International Phonetic Alphabet for English
*IPA chart for English

External links

* [http://www.kirshenbaum.net/IPA/ascii-ipa.pdf Kirshenbaum specification] (PDF file)
* [http://alt-usage-english.org/ipa/ascii_ipa_combined.shtml Tutorial and guide with sound samples]