Kirshenbaum

Kirshenbaum, sometimes called ASCII-IPA, 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.

Like the more common SAMPA, the system uses lower-case letters to represent the directly corresponding IPA character. However, the mapping used to represent other characters often differs. For example—

Sound	IPA	SAMPA	Kirshenbaum
schwa		@	@
ae ligature	æ	{	&
script a	ɑ	A	A
epsilon	ɛ	E	E
theta	θ	T	T
eth	ð	D	D
esh	ʃ	S	S
ezh	ʒ	Z	Z
eng	ŋ	N	N
reversed c	ɔ	O	O
reversed script a	ɒ	Q	A.
reversed epsilon	ɜ	3	V"
primary stress	ˈ	"	'
secondary stress	ˌ	%	,

For a more complete rendition of the Kirshenbaum system, see Kirshenbaum chart.

External links

• Kirshenbaum specification (PDF file)
• Tutorial and guide with sound samples