SAM, an international project funded by the European ESPRIT initiative, is concerned with the methodology of assessment of the speech interface with computers. The applications at which the SAM Project aims require that recorded-speech corpora be both defined and created on a European scale. Within the present stage of development (called the “extension phase”) some three different aspects of this work have to be specified and developed:

We have designed special IPA characters for IPA phonemic transcriptions of the following languages: E[nglish—RP and GA], F[rench], G[erman], I[talian], P[olish], R[ussian], Sp[anish] and Sw[edish], using two different programs which can be run under MS-DOS (BIOS) on an IBM PC or compatible. One, the ChiWriter—henceforth CH—is a complete word processor whilst the other, the LETTRIX—henceforth L—has to be combined with a word processor, such as WordStar, which we have used. In either case, we have designed our characters for a 9-pin dot-matrix printer, though CH also allows font design for a 24-pin or a laser printer. A Quality option has to be chosen, which reduces the printing speed by a factor of two with L and four with CH.

The usual description of vowels in respect to their “phonetic quality” requires the linguist to locate them within a so-called “vowel space,” apparently articulatory in nature, and having three dimensions labeled high-low (or close-open), front-back, and unrounded-rounded. The first two are coordinates of tongue with associated jaw position, while the third specifies the posture of the lips. It is recognized that vowels can vary qualitatively in ways that this three-dimensional space does not account for. So, for example, vowels may differ in degree of nasalization, and they may be rhotacized or r-colored. Moreover, it is recognized that while this vowel space serves important functions within the community of linguists, both the two measures of tongue position and the one for the lips inadequately identify those aspects of vocal tract shapes that are primarily responsible for the distinctive phonetic qualities of vowels (Ladefoged 1971). With all this said, it remains true enough that almost any vowel pair of different qualities can be described as occupying different positions with the space. Someone hearing two vowels in sequence and detecting a quality difference will presumably also be able to diagnose the nature of the articulatory shift executed in going from one vowel to the other.

This paper is intended to provide a general orientation regarding the articulatory phonetics of the languages involved in the SAM project, as described in Wells (1987): it comprises a brief statement of the phonemic system of each language (the consonants and vowels, and how they are transcribed), together with notes on the most salient realizational and suprasegmental characteristics. As in Wells (1987), the objective is to assign a computer-coded phonemic notation, referred to as SAM-PA, using only the printable symbols from the 7-bit ASCII series.