Wanya/Orthography

This page contains text in the Wanya alphabet and romanization. It renders best if you have the Unifont CSUR and Geneva fonts installed.

Wanya can be written in a number of different systems: the native Wanya alphabet (); the Unicode-based romanization which always has exactly one letter for one sound (or letter in the native script); the ASCII-friendly romanization which only uses Latin capital and small letters, spaces, and optionally punctuation marks; and Ajan. Here they are in comparison (Ajan is to be added):

Phoneme			Alphabet						Unicode-based						ASCII-friendly
b	d	ɡ							Б	b	D	d	G	g	B	b	D	d	G	g
w	ɹ	j							W	w	Я	ɹ	Y	y	W	w	Ll	ll	J	j
p	t	k							P	p	T	t	K	k	P	p	T	t	K	k
ð	l	ʎ							Δ	δ	L	l	Λ	λ	Dd	dd	L	l	Y	y
i	ɘ	u							I	i	Ǝ	ə	U	u	I	i	X	x	U	u
β	r	ʁ							B	β	R	r	Ꝛ	ꝛ	Bb	bb	Rr	rr	R	r
v	z	ɣ							V	v	Z	z	Γ	γ	V	v	Z	z	Gg	gg
m	n	ŋ							M	m	N	n	Ŋ	ŋ	M	m	N	n	Nn	nn
f	s	x							F	f	S	s	X	x	F	f	S	s	Kk	kk
ɛ	a	ɔ							E	e	A	a	O	o	E	e	A	a	O	o

Wanya alphabet

KalaΔəTek, the Wanya alphapet and symbols.

Wanya's native script is an alphabet, shown in the image.

Each phoneme is represented by one of several letters. Normally the language is written in small letters, but the first letter of a name, and the first letter of the first word of a sentence is a capital one. When a name consists of multiple words in the original language, it is written in PascalCase. Abbreviations are written in all-caps. Consonants have two letters — the capital and small letter — and vowels have four letters — capital and small versions of the standard and diphthong letters. The diphthong letters are only used for the second vowel in a diphthong, e.g. the i in rais would be represented by the small diphthong letter, while the ï in raïs would be represented by the small standard letter. In the table below, the diphthong letters follow the standard letters.

The first 3 columns are capital letters, the next three are small letters, and everything else is symbols. After the standard vowel letters (rows 5 and 11), the diphthong vowel letters are listed (rows 6 and 12).

The symbol that looks like a striked-through sine wave (or the Latin small letter m) is the equals sign (dezdanyo). It is commonly romanized as “=”.

The symbol that looks like the Latin capital letter S is the number sign (gurunyo). It is commonly romanized as “#”.

The symbol that looks like two small parallel vertical lines is the comma (kaskanyo). It is placed at about the same height as a Latin comma, and commonly romanized as “,”.

The symbols that look like an opening and closing square bracket, respectively, are the opening an closing parentheses (kure and mai). They are used for multiple purposes, sometimes even as a shorthand for the words they are named after. They are commonly romanized as “[” and “]”, but in some texts they are transcribed as ‘“’ and ‘”’ when they delimit direct speech, “[” and “]” when they occur in numbers, and “(” and “)” otherwise.

The remaining two symbols, here shown on a circular placeholder character, are placed on letters.

The one that looks like a vertical line is the accent mark (oxikonyo), and is commonly placed on the letter Ǝ or ə (but can, in theory, be placed on any letter). It denotes that the letter is stressed (an ə with oxikonyo is pronounced as [e] instead of [ə]). The oxikonyo is usually romanized as “´”; an Ǝ or ə with oxikonyo is usually romanized as “Ǝ́” or “ə́”.

The one that looks like the Wanya small letter ɹ (or a flipped tilde) is the diæresis (ɹuꝛanyo, colloquially ɹənyo or even ɹətek). It works like a diæresis in the Latin alphabet: you place it on a vowel to indicate that it is never used as the second vowel in a diphthong. It is not usually used in normal writing (since there are separate letters for use in diphthongs); only in dictionaries or for clarification. It is usually romanized as a combining diæresis (e.g. “ÏƎ̈Ü ËÄÖ ïӛü ëäö”), although a diæresis is also used in the romanization if it was (or would be) missing in the Wanya alphabet version.

The image lacks the unit symbols (which have not been invented yet) and the pause sign (nainyo), which is also used as a shorthand for “this space intentionally left blank” or “nothing to see here”. It is commonly romanized as “_”.

Unicode romanization

This is what is used on FrathWiki to transcribe Wanya.

The Unicode-based romanization uses the diaeresis to indicate a vowel cluster, for example:

• rais [raɪʃ]
• raïs [ra.iʃ]
• kuäi [ku.aɪ]
• kuaï [kua.i]
• kuäï [ku.a.i]

Each example could theoretically be a different word. Kuai cannot be a Wanya word since triphthongs are not allowed.

Since the native alphabet doesn't use any punctuation marks, they are optional in the romanizations.

ASCII romanization

This romanization is used instead of the Unicode romanization if some of the characters are unsupported. In order not to be confused with the Unicode romanization, text in it should be surrounded in fake angular brackets (< and >).

The diaeresis in the Unicode romanization is sometimes replaced by a colon:

• <rrais> [raɪʃ]
• <rra:is> [ra.iʃ]
• <ku:ai> [ku.aɪ]
• <kua:i> [kua.i]
• <ku:a:i> [ku.a.i]

Ajan

Wanya can also be written in a variation of the Ajan abjad, which is written in vertical lines from top to bottom, left to right.

Since Ajan does not distinguish between capital and small letters, the start of a new sentence is indicated using either a line break or a horizontal bar.