BXS (Benct’s X-SAMPA) is an extension and alteration of CXS
(Conlang X-SAMPA) which in turn is an extension of X-SAMPA.
While CXS is in spite of being defined by the de facto
usage of the members of the Conlang mailing list
mostly backwards-compatible with X-SAMPA, BXS is not
backwards-compatible with either, although differences (apart from
additions) from CXS are small, since I want fellew lit members to
be able to interpret BXS without too much trouble, should I happen
to use BXS rather than CXS on the list! :-) The premium in choosing
BXS notations is rather inner consistency and “making sense”
compared to the IPA/Unicode
characters they correspond to. Thus e.g. P is
ɸ rather than ʋ (which
is v\) although I need ʋ more
often that ɸ, because it restores analogy
between P B = ɸ β and
T D = θ ð which at least to
me is a better mnemonic; otherwise I ended up using p\
for ɸ and v\ for
ʋ and not using P at all just as
I’ve ended up not using F at all, instead preferring
m\ for ɱ. BXS also contains
notations for some nonstandard (some very nonstandard) phonetic
symbols, or for abbreviating some long CXS notations for sounds
which occur frequently like 8\ instead of
8_+_w (which I anyway simplify to
ɵ̟ in IPA because the full IPA
ɵ̟ʷ is too much of a mouthful IMHO)
or w\ and ψ for
β̞ which I use just because they look
good (you have to admit that ψ looks like a
cross between ʋ , ɸ and
w at least in some fonts! :-)
Since I’m very used to typing CXS and BXS it came naturally to
make a Vim keymap from BXS notations to their
correspoonding IPA/Unicode characters. Since differences between
BXS and CXS are small I hope other Vim users who are used to CXS
and X-SAMPA will find it useful. In addition to the BXS mappings
proper it contains some convenience mappings such as
<punctuation char>\ to get some literal
punctuation characters, and b\ g\ to get
ƀ and ǥ, which are
since before the IPA existed are used instead of
β and ɣ in Germanic philology.
The latter should not be seen as if I prefer
ƀ ǥ to β ɣ,
but only so that I want them available for situations where I need
them. BTW you can get ɡ as opposed to
g by typing g\\!