Universal Transcription System (Jörg Rhiemeier)

For many years, Jörg Rhiemeier used a Universal Transcription System to transcribe all his conlangs. Today, with a more refined understanding of phonology, he no longer uses this system as such, but designs transcriptions according to the phonological needs of the languages, though some of the transcriptions Jörg uses for his conlangs are still loosely based on it. But in 2019, the system was reborn in an extended form as the Internatonal Hesperic Alphabet.

The transcription system is charted below. The sounds represented in the scheme are essentially a union of the English and German phoneme inventories, which means that many possible human speech sounds are not represented in the "Universal" Transcription System.

Consonants

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Voiceless stops	p	t				k	'
Voiced stops	b	d				g
Voiceless fricatives	f	th	s	sh	jh	kh	h
Voiced fricatives	v	dh	z	zh		gh
Nasals	m	n			nj	ng
Laterals		l			lj
Rhotics		r
Semivowels	w				j

Affricates were broken up into stop + fricative, e.g. ts, dzh. The letters c, q and x were only used in the following synonyms:

• c = ts
• ch = tsh
• qu = kw
• x = ks
• xh = ksh

In an early version, r was used for a voiced velar fricative (later changed to gh), reflecting an idiosyncrasy of the author's native idiolect!

Obviously, this misses several entire places (e.g., retroflex, uvular, pharyneal) and manners of articulation (e.g., lateral fricatives, ejectives, implosives, clicks) of whose existence the author wasn't aware back then.

Vowels

	Front unround	Front round	Central unround	Back round
High	i	y		u
Mid	e	oe		o
Low	ae		a	ao

Diphthongs were, like affricates, broken up, e.g. ei, au. Vowels in hiatus were separated by an apostrophe. Again, many possible vowels are not covered.

See also

• International Hesperic Alphabet
• Glastonbury University Transcription System