Kirshenbaum, sometimes called ASCII-IPA or erkIPA,'s a system used to represent the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in ASCII. It was developed for Usenet, notably the newsgroups sci.lang and alt.usage.english. It's named after Evan Kirshenbaum, who led the collaboration that created it. The system uses almost all lower-case letters to represent the directly corresponding IPA character, but unlike X-SAMPA has the notable exception of the letter 'r'. Examples where the two systems have a dif… (More on Kirshenbaum)