This SAMPA looks very ugly to me and I have never learnt it.
I also find many of its usages to be counterintuitive. The advantage of the "unusual" symbols is that the reader does not have preconceptions about what they mean.
Ec
That's not true of SAMPA or the IPA. For example they both use j for a y sound (as in "yes") and y for a oo vowel sound (as in French "tu"). Also, SAMPA uses symbols like @{}&123456789 etc, and you can't say you have preconceived ideas of how to pronounce those. :)
But I feel like we're wandering further and futher off-topic, so I'll stop there.
By the way, arial unicode ms is on sourceforge, so I finally have a decent font which can handle the IPA. All my previous comments about SAMPA having maximum cross-browser compatability still stand though.
Fabi.
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