Suprasegmentals

This is a listing and cross reference of the suprasegmental phones that are used by the three phonetic alphabets that System.Speech supports. See Phonetic Alphabet Reference.

The table columns contain the following information:

• UPS. The phone label specified in Microsoft’s Universal Phone Set (UPS).

• IPA. The phone label specified in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) phone set.

• Unicode. The Unicode value from the IPA phone set.

• SAPI ID. The Speech API (SAPI) phone ID, which in most cases is the Unicode value.

• IPA Description. This column describes the features of the phone. See the Glossary of Phonetic Terms for more information about the features of phones.

• X-SAMPA. The equivalent phone in X-SAMPA for reference.

• SAPI Equivalent. The equivalent SAPI label, if applicable.

Suprasegmental Phones

Suprasegmentals describe the features of a language above the level of individual consonants and vowels, such as prosody, tone, length, and stress.

The first set of suprasegmental symbols, up to and including “linking”, map directly to the IPA suprasegmental set and therefore have the IPA Unicode value as the SAPI phone ID. This set includes length diacritics for long, half-long, and extra-short. Length is often used phonemically, so length markers could also belong in the diacritics table. For this reason they are given the lower case label format of a diacritic.

The remaining suprasegmental symbols are used in UPS to describe intonation contours in text-to-speech markup (SSML prompt documents). These UPS symbols were formed by prefixing the original SAPI labels with an underscore. This makes them more easily identifiable as a class and removes any ambiguity with other IPA symbols. For example the old SAPI symbol ‘!’ sentence terminator is the IPA symbol for an alveolar click.