Kirshenbaum, sometimes called ASCII-IPA or erkIPA, is a system used to represent the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in ASCII. This way it allows typewriting IPA-symbols by regular keyboard. 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 eSpeak open source software speech synthesizer uses the Kirshenbaum scheme.

Comparison of Kirshenbaum with X-SAMPA

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'. A non-comprehensive list of sounds where the two systems use different characters:

Kirshenbaum charts of consonants and vowels

''This chart is based on information provided in the Kirshenbaum specification. It may also be helpful to compare it to the SAMPA chart or X-SAMPA chart.''

Consonant chart

The IPA consonant chart, for comparison, uses many symbols that are less widely supported:

Vowel chart

The IPA vowel chart, by comparison, uses many symbols that are less widely supported:

Vowel modifiers and diacritics

Modifiers and diacritics follow the symbol they modify. Stress**** is indicated by ******** ******** for primary stress, and ******** ******** for secondary stress, placed before the stressed ****syllable.

Background

The Kirshenbaum system started developing in August 1992 through a usenet group, after "being fed up with describing the sound of words by using other words". It should be usable for both phonemic and narrow phonetic transcription. The developers decided to use the existing IPA alphabet, mapping each segment to a single keyboard character, and adding extra ASCII characters optionally for IPA diacritics. An early (1993), different set in ASCII was derived from the pronunciation guide in Merriam-Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, which uses straight letters to describe the sound. Kirshenbaum's document, Representing IPA phonetics in ASCII, is commonly used as an example of an "IPA ASCII" system. The eSpeak software speech synthesizer uses the Kirshenbaum scheme to represent phonemes with ascii characters.

Encoding

IETF language tags have registered fonkirsh as a variant subtag identifying text as transcribed in this convention.

Notes and references