 | This article includes alist of references,related reading, orexternal links,but its sources remain unclear because it lacksinline citations. Please helpimprove this article byintroducing more precise citations.(May 2018) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
TheSpeech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet (SAMPA) is a computer-readable phonetic script using 7-bit printableASCII characters, based on theInternational Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It was originally developed in the late 1980s for six European languages by theEECESPRIT 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. [@] forschwa (IPA[ə]), [2] for the vowel sound found inFrenchdeux'two' (IPA[ø]), and [9] for the vowel sound found in Frenchneuf'nine' (IPA[œ]).
The characters ["s{mp@] represent the pronunciation of the name SAMPA in English, with the initial symbol ["] indicating primary stress (in IPA,/ˈsæmpə/). Like IPA, SAMPA is usually enclosed insquare brackets orslashes, which are not part of the alphabet proper and merely signify that it is phonetic as opposed to regular text.
Today, officially, SAMPA has been developed for all the sounds of the following languages:
SAMPA was developed in the late 1980s in theEuropean Commission-fundedESPRIT 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 partialencoding of theIPA. 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 thisIPA encoding technique universally applicable,X-SAMPA was created, which providesone single table without language-specific differences.
SAMPA was devised as ahack to work around the inability oftext encodings to represent IPA symbols. Consequently, asUnicode 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[1][better source needed] in computational phonetics and in speech technology.
