SALAM.

(I should start by mentioning that I use Kirshenbaum
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirshenbaum_chart... on this list X-SAMPA seems
to be more popular, but I don't know it; it's largely identical anyway. If
you like, I can resend the whole thing as an HTML message in Unicode with
true IPA.)

I find SASXSEK quite impressive. It avoids practically all of the standard
flaws of auxlang-making http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/! There
are, however, a few things that made me curious.

First is the choice of <x> for /@/. As a better choice <y> has been
suggested. It is true that <y> runs the risk of being confused with [j], [i]
and [y]... but confusing it with [I], [i"] or [I.] would actually put the
speaker on the _right_ track, because such sounds are the closest many
languages get to [@]. On the other hand, <x> runs the risk of being confused
with not only [ks] but also [x]/[X], [S] and maybe even the Mandarin phoneme
that is probably best explained as simultaneous [C] and [S;]. It is true
that SASXSEK already has a "weird" choice anyway, namely <q>, but that one
stays a consonant, and it's possible to build a mental bridge "q -- k --
g -- ng", so IMHO that's considerably less of a problem than <x>.

Secondly, I don't understand why, if there are already 6 vowels (most
languages seem to have 5), why is one of them only used in one single
morpheme (/@/ for making compound words)? This strikes me as rather
wasteful, and it would lead lots of people to not distinguishing it from,
say, /e/ or /a/. There are lots of logical places for /@/, such as Chinese
words with /o-/ (like in the syllables that end in <-eng> in Pinyin), or the
spaces we create in consonant clusters (which would become more recognizable
to speakers of consonant-cluster languages if they contained /@/).

Then there are some phonemic distinctions which are globally rare.
- Few languages have both /w/ and /v/. Many native speakers of German
pronounce both of them as [w] in English because they find keeping the
difference more difficult than pronouncing [w] alone already is for them! On
the other hand, Mandarin, Cantonese and many more have only /w/ and lack
/v/. Currently SASXSEK is designed to avoid ambiguity between /f/ and /v/;
IMHO this potential confusion is _much_ less of a problem than the /w/-/v/
distinction.
Having [v] as an allophone of /w/ would make it a lot easier for a
lot of people to pronounce /wi/ (a combination that, for example, doesn't
occur in Mandarin or Japanese).
- I'm rather surprised by the occurrence of /z/. Globally, [z] is quite a
rare sound, and as a phoneme it's rarer still -- rarer than, say, /?/. (For
example, in northern and central Germany [z] the allophone of /s/ used in
voiced surroundings, including the beginning of a word, while in the rest of
the German-speaking world it doesn't exist at all. Even in English it's hard
to find minimal pairs like <sane>/<zany>.) Why not change the few words that
have it back to /s/?

On the other hand, I don't know whether exclusivity needs to be maintained
between the voiced and unvoiced stops. Different languages use different
features for distinguishing them, but few if any languages only have one
series of stops. (Perhaps I should mention the southeastern kinds of
German -- including Austrian Standard German -- as a case study: /b d g/ are
not voiced, /p t k/ are not aspirated or ejective or anything, and still the
difference is phonemic!)

Which reminds me... we should try to document the approximate range of
allowed realizations for each phoneme, for example to clear up whether a
tap/flap should be /r/, /d/, /t/ or forbidden.

The emphatic particle <aj> is a great idea! Russian (/ZE/) and English
(<fucking>) have such a thing, but most other languages sorely lack it. :-)

What is the difference between <ri> and <ru>? I can't figure it out.