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Are there any other graphic systems that attempt to be as complete as the International Phonetic Alphabet?

blunders
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7 Answers7

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See

In addition there are phonetic notations that are designed with one language or group of languages in mind, for example Romaji for Japanese, pinyin for Chinese languages, and the many pronunciation respelling for English.

Louis Rhys
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  • +1 @Louis Rhys: Thanks, it's been awhile, forgot about SAMPA, which in turn lead me to the Wiki page for Phonetic_transcription - guess I'm really looking for something that's not base on IPA though. – blunders Sep 23 '11 at 02:28
  • APA is not based on IPA. The wikipedia page you linked also mention the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet. – Louis Rhys Sep 23 '11 at 02:38
  • SAMPA is a bit confusing really. It's actually multiple related phonemic alphabets for various languages. It does not try to represent all sounds in all languages. For that there is its cousins X-SAMPA. A lot of people are confused by this for obvious reasons. – hippietrail Sep 23 '11 at 13:46
  • By the way, is Americanist the same as Kirschenbaum which I've seen references to somewhere or other? – hippietrail Sep 23 '11 at 21:22
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    @hippietrail according to wikipedia Kirschenbaum is just a mapping of IPA so that people can type it easily using a normal keyboard.. – Louis Rhys Sep 24 '11 at 04:44
  • I am maintaining a list at http://reecedunn.co.uk/cainteoir/design/phoneme-transcription-schemes.html. The main classifications are Arpabet-based, SAMPA-based, IPA-based and language-specific phonetic alphabets. SAMPA is not IPA-based -- it is specific to each language (sampa-en is closer to Arpabet than IPA). X-SAMPA and derivatives attempt to be closer to IPA than the language-specific variants. – reece Mar 02 '13 at 19:36
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The Finno-Ugric Transcription, a.k.a. the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet is comparably complete to IPA and much more regular and flexible.

kamil-s
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    @Alenanno: please do not edit my posts in a way that changes their meaning. I most definitely do not think that IPA is more regular or flexible than FUT. Just the opposite. Also, whether it is that or not is not a matter of my belief. FUT is objectively more regular than IPA; it is enough to just look at how they're constructed. And greater regularity gives FUT greater flexibility. I don't see why you should put the "I think" bit in my mouth. BTW, why was it wrong to offer a draft of my paper? – kamil-s Feb 25 '12 at 00:40
  • You said "objectively", who said it? As far as I know, you're the only and first one who said this, and that's why I added the "I think" part. Your answer makes it seem as it's an objective fact, while it's not. If you can prove it's objective, then expand your answer, otherwise I'll have no choice but re-edit it. I removed that part as it was not part of the answer but a personal comment. – Alenanno Feb 25 '12 at 00:43
  • The "I think" bit isn't really important to me, you can re-edit it and I won't protest again. It was the "to IPA and" > "to IPA which" that I objected to. My paper discusses various transcription systems, their built and usability for different purposes, so actually it was a part of the answer, not a personal comment. At any rate, FUT is objectively more regular than IPA, never mind who said it first and that you missed him or her saying it. Study the construction of FUT and compare it to the construction of IPA. (Only please use a decent source like Setälä 1901 or [continued in the next post] – kamil-s Feb 25 '12 at 00:57
  • [continued] Sovijärvi/Peltola 1977 rather than Wikipedia.) You will see that FUT is based on a relatively small number of letters to which diacritics are attached in a regular manner to adjust their meaning, and that the function of each diacritic is defined and constant. Now compare this to IPA where it is virtually impossible to say what modification of the shape of a letter means what and with what symbol any phonetic feature is recorded. This is what I mean by "greater regularity", and I really can't see how this is a personal, subjective opinion. – kamil-s Feb 25 '12 at 01:01
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    If that was what you objected to, why didn't you just fix that instead of reverting the edit? Second, if you propose here parts of your paper and then link to it, that's OK, but if you say "I wrote a paper here, email me for info", then it's not OK. That's the difference. About the UPA/FUT, I gave it a look, and as it says, it looks like a transcription system rather than a phonetic alphabet; not to mention it's used predominantly for Uralic languages, while IPA is universal. – Alenanno Feb 25 '12 at 01:25
  • This is an interesting system. It's unclear to me how certain types of segments, in particular certain liquids, approximants and retroflexes, would be transcribed. though; e.g. AmE "rollerway" IPA /ˈɹoʊɫɚˌweɪ/ or Tamil இரண்டு "two" IPA /iraṇṭu/ – Mark Beadles Feb 25 '12 at 02:19
  • @Alenanno: I decicded to write a comment because I react very badly to my posts being changed to the opposite meaning. I actually sign them with my real name and really don't like to see by chance that someone's edited them and now they mean precisely what I don't think. I didn't link to my paper because it's not online because I'm waiting till it's published with that, but decided to mention it nevertheless because it's on this topic. What is the difference between a transcription system and a phonetic alphabet? What FUT is usually used for doesn't define what it can be used for. [continued] – kamil-s Feb 25 '12 at 08:05
  • [continued] By the same token you could say IPA isn't universal because very few non-Anglo-Saxons use it for historical linguistics. It doesn't make sense. Popularity of a system is not the same thing as its possible scope of application. – kamil-s Feb 25 '12 at 08:10
  • @MarkBeadles: I'm sorry, I don't know. If you have access to it, you might want to check Iivonen A., Sovijärvi A., Aulanko R. 1990, Foneettisen kirjoituksen kehitys ja nykytila: kansainvälinen foneettinen aakkosto (IPA), Suomalais-ugrilainen tarkekirjoitus (SUT), (= Helsingin yliopiston fonetiikan laitoksen monisteita 16), Helsinki. Sorry again. – kamil-s Feb 25 '12 at 08:17
  • @KamilStachowski IPA is used for any language, not just English. English requires it in its dictionaries while others don't, ok, but if I'm studying linguistics I'll see IPA being used for whatever language it's on. Everyone can comment here, if someone changes the meaning, you can let them know, just don't react badly. :) – Alenanno Feb 25 '12 at 09:31
  • @Alenanno: IPA is used for plenty of languages, true, but this doesn't in any way say FUT isn't a universal system. The question was specifically to name a system other than IPA so I named FUT, and I added a little bit of information because it's much less popular than IPA. I don't mind comments. I mind editing. Here at least it says that someone edited the post, which is good, but I still don't like the practice of changing somebody's words without notification. If I were rude, imprecise or clearly wrong, I would only thank you. But I don't think I did any of these here. – kamil-s Feb 25 '12 at 09:47
  • @KamilStachowski Other people can edit your posts. And by the way, there is a notification, from your user profile, check the tab "Responses". There you'll receive notifications about comments, answers and revisions. – Alenanno Feb 25 '12 at 10:06
  • @Alenanno: Well, that is just a list of revisions which I have to constantly keep checking. A notification would have shown up under "StackExchange" in the blue bar at the top of the site, or in my email. All right, I'll just keep checking that if this is the only way. – kamil-s Feb 25 '12 at 11:01
  • @KamilStachowski Actually you can set it to receive an email. – Alenanno Feb 25 '12 at 11:09
  • @Alenanno: Yes, I only noticed it today, thank you. But does it notify me about revisions, too? Because they don't show up in the list. – kamil-s Feb 25 '12 at 12:46
  • @KamilStachowski Thank you for the source; alas! I do not read Finnish. Is there a Russian translation perhaps? – Mark Beadles Feb 25 '12 at 15:15
  • @MarkBeadles: I don't think there is a Russian translation but one never knows. I don't speak Finnish either. I just assumed there would be comparative tables in it. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the book myself, so I am just guessing by the title. I'm sorry I can't help more. – kamil-s Feb 25 '12 at 18:55
  • @KamilStachowski dziękuję :) – Mark Beadles Feb 25 '12 at 19:42
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I hope that this thread is not too dead, but I'd like to add IKPA - International Korean Phonetic Alphabet. It's based on Hangeul, so is mostly featural.

mudri
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There is the Universal Phonetic Alphabet. I tried to post this some time ago, but couldn't find the link. Here it is; https://omniglot.com/conscripts/upa.htm

taupist
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  • Very interesting proposal in fact! It looks like it follows (kind of) and (much) further expands on the spirit of Tolkien's Tengwar script. – Hvjurthuk Feb 04 '22 at 00:38
  • I haven't invested a lot of time in Tolkien's work, I hadn't seen a connection. Perhaps I should reconsider, it wasn't my intent to post fictional content. – taupist Feb 05 '22 at 17:52
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Visible Speech (1869) by Aleander Meville Bell and Standard Alphabet (1855) by Lepsius, whom Bell fit his characters on top of. Both systems are fully capable of expressing all of the phonemic distinctions that IPA does. If you would like primarily Latin based with Greek characters to supplement I would recommend Standard Alphabet. If you would like a character system that attempts to symbolize the organs used, Visible Speech does that. The Visible Speech vowel system is actually more complete than IPA, having 36 vowels instead of 28. Lepsius demonstrates how the Standard Alphabet maps to an exhaustive list of world languages at the end of his book. Bell has some examples of his system used in German, French, Cockney, American, and Gaelic. Since Bell's systems is based on Lepsius the mapping to world languages applies equally to his.

user40301
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I have created a Unicode phonetic alphabet that I personally think is even better than the IPA.

It is the result of many hours of work on my behalf.

You can find the documentation on how to use it here: https://github.com/SalviaSage/Translingual-Phonetic-Alphabet

I update this page as I develop the alphabet further.

Salvia
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    Welcome to Linguistics! Whilst this may theoretically answer the question, it would be preferable to include the essential parts of the answer here, and provide the link for reference. Otherwise, once the linked page gets moved or removed (e.g. if you move from GitHub or rename the project), your entire answer render invalid. – Be Brave Be Like Ukraine Sep 01 '19 at 18:43
  • I am actually interested in/intrigued by your answer. Could you actually develop it further here as @bytebuster suggests instead of just sending us outside via simple link? What are the distinctive features of this phonetic alphabet? – Hvjurthuk Feb 04 '22 at 00:33
  • Hi there. Thanks for your interest in my phonetic alphabet. I designed it because I believed the IPA wasn't good enough and that certain parts of it was wrong. For example, my alphabet has a different vowel system which I'm convinced is more factual. It has specific letters for affricates (IPA uses two letters as plosive+fricative.) Also, it can be typed using a keyboard, has a 3 tone distinction instead of 5 and other things. Contact me on Discord if you want to learn more. – Salvia Feb 06 '22 at 07:01
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Here's another option: the Musa Alphabet. It's not based on the Roman alphabet at all, which leads to less confusion and clearer features. You can read all about it at www.musa.bet. And here's a page where Musa is directly compared to the IPA: musa.bet/ipa.

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Peter Cyrus
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