Comparison of ASCII phonetic alphabets

Most, tho not all of these are based on the IPA.

A brief introduction of the systems:

• X-SAMPA, a general extension of SAMPA designed to accommodate the entire IPA. Z-SAMPA, develop'd on the ZBB, is a fully backwards compatible extension that includes the Extensions to the IPA and various other symbols, such as true mid vowels. Z-SAMPA extensions are mark'd by a green background.
• CXS is another variation of X-SAMPA used mostly on the CONLANG list. It is not entirely backwards compatible.
• Kirshenbaum is a somewhat more limited system that makes good use of diacritics, but has to quickly resort to diacritics such as <trl> (yes, that's a pentagraph) to describe sounds outside its "core focus" of English phonetics.
• TIPA, used in LaTeX typesetting of IPA.
• Carrasquer (description needed)
• Branner (description needed)

I am purposely exclusing the Coutts-Barrett system, based on graphical mnemonics to suggest IPA letters. It is very non-compatible with all the other systems, both in the details (for example, '-d' for ð, or 'n)' for ŋ),a nd in being prefixing rather than postfixing. I've also never seen it in use anywhere!

Symbols expressible by means of diacritics are not included in the table.

Latin minuscules

Aluckily, just about everyone agrees that these should be equated with their IPA values. Tabulating these would be a waste of spacetime :-) Let's just remark on the habit of sometimes falling back on transcription based on some specific language's orthography. Common cases include <y> for /j/, which may be follo'd with <j> for /ʤ/ and <c> for /ʧ/ or /ʦ/. A good indicator of this type of transcription is seeing <š ž> for /ʃ ʒ/.

Standardized

There is little disagreement over these assignments.

IPA	SAMPoids	Kirsh.	TIPA	Carr.	Brann.	Comments
ɑ	A	A	A	A	A
β	B	B	B	B	V
ç	C	C	C	C	c"
ð	D	D	D	D	D
ɛ	E	E	E	E	E
ɪ	I	I	I	I	I
ɱ	F	M	M	M	M	SAMPA 'M' is /ɯ/.
ŋ	N	N	N	N	ng)	Branner has to do this because it uses 'N' on /ɴ/.
ɔ	O	O	O	O	O
ʃ	S	S	S	S	S
θ	T	T	T	T	T
ʊ	U	U	U	U	U
χ	X	X	X	X	X
ʏ	Y	I.	Y	Y	Y	Kirshenbaum breiks here the well-estabilish'd pattern to use capital vowels for lax forms, instead going for the rounding diacritic. This is because 'Y' stands for /ø/. How this is supposed to be logical (as opposed to making 'e.' /ø/) escapes me.
ʒ	Z	Z	Z	Z	Z
ə	@	@	@	@	@
ʔ	?	?	P	?	?	TIPA may be, I think, unable to use the symbol '?'.
ː	:	:	:	:	:

Competing standards

Assignments that are fairly intuitiv, yet not sufficiently so.

AN obvious subsection is the issue of IPA smallcaps. Kirshenbaum and Branner go for the graphically obvious substitution by the corresponding actual capitals. Other systems notice this too, but add some escape caracter, to be able to free the simple capitals to some other use.

IPA	SAMPoids	Kirsh.	TIPA	Carr.	Brann.	Comments
ɣ	G	Q	G	G	g"	Arguably ɣ fits better together here, due to the pattern set by B D.
ʎ	L	l^	L	L	y&	Kirshenbaum demonstrating its "palatal" diacritic, and Branner its graphical-mnemonic structure. Other assignments exist, for example /ɬ/ in Uralistics.
ɢ	G\	G	\;G	G"	G
ʟ	L\	L	\;L	L"	L

IPA	X-SAMPA	CXS	Kirsh.	TIPA	Carr.	Brann.	Comments
æ	{	&	&		&	ae)	SAMPA is supposed to be on the premise that this "looks like A in smiley-view". Most others rather play into the graphical similarity combined with the mnemonic "and" [ænd].
ɸ	p\	P	F	F	P	F	One of SAMPA's sillier features, IMHO. Considering the symmetry of 'T D', your author quite prefers 'P B'.

Numbers and punctuation

IPA	X-SAMPA (Z-SAMPA)	CXS	Kirsh.	TIPA	Carr.	Brann.	Comments