fabiform wrote:
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.
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. :)
I don't know about others, but I have the preconceptions that (a) digits have numerical values and nothing to do with pronunciations; (b) curly brackets usually occur in matching pairs, and serve to parenthesise other semantic symbols rather than being a semantic symbol itself.
I also don't like how these ASCII-IPA systems are completely backwards and outdated, but that's POV.
Timwi