Introduction

As mentioned on the main page, the romanization is the result of exposure to English phonics and continental pronunciation, as well as a lack of historical understanding as to why English did things the way it did, and a fascination with diacritics. Following are some of the peculiarities.

Vowel chart

	a		e			i	o		u		y
	short	long	short	long	other	long	short	long	short	long	long
unstressed	a	ä	e	ë	ê	i	o	ö	u	ü	y
stressed	à	á	è	é	ê	í	ò	ó	ù	ú	ý
pronunciation	/ a /	/ e /	/ E /	/ e /	/ i /	/ i /	/ O /	/ o /	/ V /	/ u /	/ i /

Yes, there are two (or four) ways to write /e/ and three (or five) ways to write /i/.

The diacritic for "short, stressed" is supposed to be an upside-down caret, derived from the rocker symbol used to denote short vowels in English, but that's not a part of Latin-1 so I had to go with the grave accent. The original is easier to distinguish from ´.

Consonants

Pronounced as expected: p, b, f, v, w, m; t, d, s, z, r, l, n; k, g, y; h.

c: in isolation, mostly /k/ and occasionally /s/. Not very original of me, I know. The /k/ pronunciation has been reanalyzed as a palato-velar stop.
j: pronounced /dZ/ as in English. There are essentially two words written with j.
q: Found in one word, a borrowing. (Literally; I borrowed it from I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.)

Diphthongs pronounced as expected: th (found in 4 words), sh (common), zh (found in 2 words), ng (found in Old Éa).

hr (found in 3 words): voiceless r.
hl (found in 1 word and an infix): voiceless l.
rr (found in 7 words): rolled r.
ch (common): pronounced variously as /x/, /tS/, and /S/, in order of frequency.
cc (found in 3 words): pronounced /ks/.

Triphthongs: csh (found in one word), sch (found in one word). Both pronounced as /S/.

Symbols: the apostrophe ' is used to separate some inflectional morphemes from the base word to which they are attached.

Reformed Orthography

The following changes are made under the reformed romanization:

• Anything pronounced /S/ will be written "sh".
• c pronounced as /k/ will be kept, but understood to be articulated differently than k.
• c pronounced as /s/ will be written with ç and pronounced /ts/.
• hr will be written as rh.
• hl will be written as lh.
• Only one diacritic will be used: ´, to mark stress.
  • long a, pronounced /e/, will be written as e.
  • short e will be written as E.
  • ê will be written as i.
  • short o will be written as O.
  • short u will be written as U.
  • non-consonantal y will be written as i.
• rr will be kept.
• ch will continue to represent /x/.
• ch pronounced as /tS/ will be written çh.
• cc will be written cç.
• j will be written (and pronounced) as zh.
• The borrowing containing qu will be left as is.

The reformed romanization is not yet widely in use.

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Last updated: 4/08/2009