X-SAMPA to IPA converter

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X-SAMPA

Conlang X-SAMPA (CXS)

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The Difference between X-SAMPA and CXS

X-SAMPA (Extended Speech Assessment Methods Phonetic Alphabet) is a system for representing the International Phonetic Alphabet using ASCII characters. It was developed in the mid-1990s when Unicode support for computers was near-distant dream. Prior to X-SAMPA, various different "SAMPAs" were already in use for individual European languages. X-SAMPA brought all SAMPAs together.

Unfortunately, X-SAMPA's design had one tiny ambiguity: the underscore is used to mean the affricate tie bar, and is used as part of certain diacritic symbols. At some point in the Internet's early history, a handful of concerned conlangers noticed this flaw and decided to use ) after an affricate group, so that t͡s is represented as ts) instead of t_s.

Conlang X-SAMPA (CXS), as they called it, also changed the stress symbols to more closely represent the IPA symbols; the primary stress symbol changed from " to ', and secondary stress from % to ,. Finally, a few other minor changes were made, as follows:

IPA	X-SAMPA	CXS
ʉ	}	u\
æ	{	&
ɶ	&	&\