__NOTOC__ The Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) is a computer-readable phonetic script using 7-bit printable

ASCII ASCII ( ), abbreviated from American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for electronic communication. ASCII codes represent text in computers, telecommunications equipment, and other devices. Because of ...

characters, based on the

International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...

(IPA). It was originally developed in the late 1980s for six European languages by the

EEC The European Economic Community (EEC) was a regional organization created by the Treaty of Rome of 1957,Today the largely rewritten treaty continues in force as the ''Treaty on the functioning of the European Union'', as renamed by the Lisb ...

ESPRIT information technology research and development program. As many symbols as possible have been taken over from the IPA; where this is not possible, other signs that are available are used, e.g. code>@for

schwa In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa (, rarely or ; sometimes spelled shwa) is a vowel sound denoted by the IPA symbol , placed in the central position of the vowel chart. In English and some other languages, it rep ...

(IPA ), code>2for the vowel sound found in

French French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to France ** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents ** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...

''deux'' (IPA ), and code>9for the vowel sound found in French ''neuf'' (IPA ). Today, officially, SAMPA has been developed for all the sounds of the following languages: The characters .html" ;"title="code>"s{mp@">code>"s{mp@represent the pronunciation of the name SAMPA in English, with the initial symbol indicating primary stress. Like IPA, SAMPA is usually enclosed in

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or slashes, which are not part of the alphabet proper and merely signify that it is phonetic as opposed to regular text.

Features

SAMPA was developed in the late 1980s in the

European Commission The European Commission (EC) is the executive of the European Union (EU). It operates as a cabinet government, with 27 members of the Commission (informally known as "Commissioners") headed by a President. It includes an administrative body o ...

-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. SAMPA is a partial

encoding In communications and information processing, code is a system of rules to convert information—such as a letter, word, sound, image, or gesture—into another form, sometimes shortened or secret, for communication through a communication ...

of the

IPA IPA commonly refers to: * India pale ale, a style of beer * International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation * Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound IPA may also refer to: Organizations International * Insolvency Practitioners ...

. 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

encoding technique universally applicable,

X-SAMPA The Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (X-SAMPA) is a variant of SAMPA developed in 1995 by John C. Wells, professor of phonetics at University College London. It is designed to unify the individual language SAMPA alphabets, and ...

was created, which provides ''one single table'' without language-specific differences. SAMPA was devised as a

hack Hack may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Games * ''Hack'' (Unix video game), a 1984 roguelike video game * ''.hack'' (video game series), a series of video games by the multimedia franchise ''.hack'' Music * ''Hack'' (album), a 199 ...

to work around the inability of

text encoding Character encoding is the process of assigning numbers to graphical characters, especially the written characters of human language, allowing them to be stored, transmitted, and transformed using digital computers. The numerical values that ...

s to represent IPA symbols. Consequently, as

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

support for IPA symbols becomes more widespread, the necessity for a separate, computer-readable system for representing the IPA in ASCII decreases. However, text input relies on specific keyboard encodings or input devices. For this reason, SAMPA and X-SAMPA are still widely used in computational phonetics and in speech technology.

References

* Ranchhod, Elisabeth & J. Mamede, Nuno (2002). ''Advances in Natural Language Processing: Third International Conference, PorTAL 2002, Faro, Portugal, June 23–26, 2002. Proceedings (

Lecture Notes in Computer Science ''Lecture Notes in Computer Science'' is a series of computer science books published by Springer Science+Business Media since 1973. Overview The series contains proceedings, post-proceedings, monographs, and Festschrifts. In addition, tutorials, ...

)''. (1st ed.). Springer. . * L. DeMiller, Anna & Rettig, James (2000). ''Linguistics: A Guide to the Reference Literature'' (2nd ed.). Libraries Unlimited. . * Lamberts, Koen & Goldstone, Rob (2004). ''Handbook of Cognition''. Sage Publications Ltd. .

External links

SAMPA computer readable phonetic alphabet

from (German) written text to SAMPA and IPA (Ajax-application)

an

{{IPA navigation 1980s establishments in Europe Writing systems introduced in the 1980s 1980s in computing

Features

See also

References

External links