Conlang/Appendix/CXS

CXS, or Conlang X-SAMPA, is an encoding of the International Phonetic Alphabet into 7-bit ASCII. CXS is a slightly modifed form of X-SAMPA, an encoding proposed in 1995 by a British phonetician, John C. Wells; the modifications have been devised by and for the members of the CONLANG mailing list &mdash; whose name gave rise to the word conlang used in this book, and thus indirectly to all the other uses of prefix con- in the Conworld series of wikibooks.

Sounds
Click on the name of a sound in these tables to hear the sound. If a sound isn't available here, its name is shown in red. If the sound files don't play on your computer, see w:Wikipedia:Media help.

You may notice that many of the red links have long names. A design priority for the CXS encoding is to give the shortest names to the most commonly encoded sounds &mdash; which means that the most unusual sounds, most likely not to have sound files available here, are also most likely to have longer names.

Consonant sounds
In the table of pulmonic consonants, for each place and manner of articulation (column and row), there may be an unvoiced consonant and a voiced consonant. Unvoiced consonants appear on the left side of that cell in the table, voiced consonants on the right.

Alternative notation ' can be used for ' (the labiodental approximant).

The joining of the two sounds in an affricate or double articulation can be notated explicitly by following the second with a right paren, as in //.

Vowel sounds
At each point in the chart, the vowel to the left of the "•" is unrounded, the vowel to the right is rounded. The symbols for the mid central and near-open central vowels do not distinguish between rounded and unrounded forms.

Diacritics and suprasegmentals
A diacritic is a modifier added to a sound symbol to either alter or more specifically describe the sound. In CXS, all diacritics are suffixes after the symbol. All but four of the CXS diacritics are sequences of two or more characters starting with underscore (the other four being the single-character diacritics ' ' ' and ').

A suprasegmental is a symbol that describes a feature of language sound above the level of consonants and vowels, such as prosody, tone, length, or stress.

Some conlangers use ' for palatalization instead of '.

Some conlangers use ' for primary stress and ' for secondary stress, instead of ' and '.

Data tables
Here are tables of detailed data on CXS symbols and other notations, arranged alphabetically by CXS coding. The tables include translations of each notation to IPA; descriptions of the notations' meanings, with links to associated Wikipedia articles; and examples of words using the notations.

For high-level explanations, and charts arranged by how the sounds are pronounced, see the next section.

Sounds
These sequences represent sounds. All CXS sequences starting with a letter or digit are here.

Diacritics and suprasegmentals
These notations represent diacritics and other information (suprasegmentals). They are ordered by primary character &mdash; which is often the first character in the sequence, but is the second character if the sequence begins with an underscore (such as ) or is an angle-bracketed letter (such as ). Letters are listed first, then digits, then non-alphanumerics.

Comparison between CXS and IPA
IPA symbols that are ordinary lower-case letters are the same in CXS as in the IPA, and vice versa.

CXS uses a following backslash as an escape character to create a new symbol. Often the new symbol is similar to the old in some way or other, as with the velar nasal ' and uvular nasal ', but sometimes they have nothing to do with each other, as with the open-mid back rounded vowel ' versus the bilabial click '.

IPA consonant symbols that are ordinary (small) upper-case letters are named in CXS by adding a backslash to the IPA symbol. IPA vowel symbols of this type (ordinary upper-case letters) are the same in CXS as in the IPA (no backslash added).

Consonants
Alternative notation ' can be used for ' (the labiodental approximant).

The joining of the two sounds in an affricate or double articulation can be notated explicitly by following the second with a right paren, as in //.

Vowels
At each point in the chart, the vowel to the left of the "•" is unrounded, the vowel to the right is rounded. The symbols for the mid central and near-open central vowels do not distinguish between rounded and unrounded forms.

Diacritics and suprasegmentals
Some conlangers use ' for palatalization instead of '.

Some conlangers use ' for primary stress and ' for secondary stress, instead of ' and '.