2445: X-SAMPA Aug 21, 2021

X-SAMPA was a system for transcribing, theoretically, any vocal sound in a standardized way. In 1995, this was not the first nor last attempt at something like this, notably coming about a century after the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) which was and is more dominant. What X-SAMPA brought to the table was that it allowed people to transcribe these sounds on a normal QWERTY keyboard as a way to get around IPA's special characters, even if they should have Unicode support. This is still used today, but X-SAMPA does not have a one-to-one correspondence with the IPA and in the current updated version there are IPA symbols that can't be transcribed in X-SAMPA.