Canepari IPA
From Langmaker
Overview
Canepari IPA or canIPA was developed by Professor Luciano Canepari (University of Venice) as an improvement over the current IPA or offIPA. His system points to major flaws in the offIPA from the fact that the offIPA is, in fact a phonemic (rather than phonetic) alphabet to it's lack of a coherent system of describing supersegmental structures. canIPA's main practical improvement is its vast amount of specific, phonetic symbols (over 1000). This allows for both more accurate transcribing and describing of languages and for comparing many languages easily.
Personal Reaction
I (Okuno Zankoku) have used both offIPA and canIPA and I must say that canIPA is much easier to use. I found that a great advantage of canIPA was its vowel system which distinguished vowels by tracking a fixed point on the tounge rather than the point of greatest closure or some other, ambiguous system of points. While I was having trouble with some of the vowels in offIPA, I was able to quite efforttlessly traverse almost the whole of the canIPA system within minutes of examining it. Another benefit canIPA is that its immense system of sounds allows for more options when creating a conlang, as well as a better way of getting across what the creator wants the language to sound like. Indeed, Canepari has used his system to find differences in a large number of Italian accents that offIPA would likely never have turned up. And finally, perhaps most importantly, canIPA has a very easy to read way of notating pitch, even in none-tone languages like English. Its system allows for easily describing the tone of statements/questions/etc so that anyone could understand it.
