The Monstrous Magyaroid All-ASCII Digraph Device

The oh so smart Hungarian digraphs

I'm a great fan of the Hungarian digraphs where the first letter indicates manner of articulation and the second place of articulation, and have been known to play with such schemes, (or the reverse, POA+MOA):

Graphy	Manner	Place	IPA
z	voiced sibilant	alveolar	[z]
s	voiceless sibilant	postalveolar	[ʃ]
sz	voiceless sibilant	alveolar	[s]
zs	voiced sibilant	postalveolar	[ʒ]
c(z)	voiceless affricate	alveolar	[ts]
cs	voiceless affricate	postalveolar	[tʃ]

The z in cz has been dropped in modern Hungarian orthography, so that the voiceless alveolar affricate is now c.

This is all the more amazing as it did not, probably, originate with someone with an unusual phonological acumen for the middle ages getting a great idea, but by sheer accident: it just so happened that Old High German, the language of those the Hungarians learned the Latin alphabet from, differentiated between an apical voiceless alveolar sibilant /s̺/, spelled s and a laminal voiceless alveolar sibilant /s̻/ spelled zz. Old High German did not yet have any [ʃ] sound, but of the two OHG sounds the apical sibilant s was perceived as being most similar to Hungarian /ʃ/ — probably because [ʃ] is usually apical —, and the laminal sibilant zz was perceived as being more similar to Hungarian /s/ — probably because the latter was laminal. Thus s became the preferred spelling for Hungarian /ʃ/ and /ʒ/, and z became the preferred spelling for Hungarian /s/ and /z/. Voiced and voiceless sibilants weren't distinguished, probably because OHG didn't have any voiced sibilants. (Incidentally the Hungarians downgraded the written representation of their language, since they already had a phonologically adequate writing system, which however was not regarded as proper for writing Christian texts on parchment.) By the time Hungarian writers felt a need to differentiate voiced and voiceless sibilants in a consistent matter they chose to use sz for /s/, probably again because of German influence: in the meantime sz (or rather ſz, usually written as a ligature) had become the preferred spelling for the sound written zz in OHG. So z remained the spelling for /z/ by default. The 'choice' of s for /ʃ/ was probably simply because that was the usual value of that letter, since /ʃ/ is by far the most frequent of the Hungarian sibilants, while /ʒ/ is the least frequent. The choice of the spelling zs for /ʒ/ was thus probably by default: they already had the spellings sz, z, s assigned to three of the sibilants for the reasons stated, and so there was probably not a lot of reasoning behind the choice of zs for the fourth sibilant, just analogy and parsimoniousness.

Taking it as far as you can

One obvious 'defect' of Hungarian spelling is that voiced affricates are written just as dz, dzs. So my first obvious 'improvement' was to assign x to [dʒ] and xz to [dz], or the reverse x = [dz], xs = [dʒ]!

But I got more ambitious than that:

Consonants

	Vcl fric.	Vcd fric.	Vcl stop	Vcd stop	Vcl affr.	Vcd affr.	Nasals	Laterals	Tap / flap	Trill (vcd)	Appr. (vcd)
Bilabial	fw	bw	p	b	pfw	bfw	mw			rw	w
Labiodental	f	fv	pv	bv	pf	bf	m		xv		v
Dental	sz	z	td	d	cz	jz	nz	lz			rz
Apicoalveolar	s	zs	t	dt	cs	js	nr	lr	xr xlr	rr	r
Laminoalveolar	sc	zc	tc	dc	c	jc	n	l			rl
Palatoalveolar	sj	zj	tj	dj	cj	j	nj	lj			rj
Alveopalatal	sy	zy	ty	dy	cy	jy	ny	ly			ry
Retroflex	sx	zx	tx	dx	cx	jx	nx	lx	x xl		rx
Palatal	hky	qy	ky	gy	khy	gqy	ngy	lgy			y
Velar	hk	qg	k	g	khk	gqg	ng	lg			yg
Uvular	hq	q	kq	gq	khq	gqq	nq	lq		rq	yq
Pharyngeal	hh	yh
Glottal	h	qh	kh

Vowels

It's a lot trickier to do a similar scheme with only five vowel letters a, e, i, o, u (since I already had to use y, w as consonants...). However, the five single vowels + all possible combinations of two of them gives 5² = 25 different vowel graphies, which should be enough qualitative distinctions for most languages. So I had a go at distributing those graphies over the vowel space, pretending that the holes in the IPA official vowel chart are really justified, and trying to give the digraphs sensible 'intermediate' values between the single-letter vowels. It's not entirely consistent: I let e and ea swap places so that [ə] would get a single-letter graphy, then based the values of eu and ae on the [ə] value for e...

	Front unrounded	Front rounded	Central unrounded	Central rounded	Back unrounded	Back rounded
High	i	ui	ia	ua	iu	u
Lower high	ie	ue				uo
High mid	ei	oi	e	eu	io	ou
Low mid	ea	oe	ae	oa	eo	o
Low	ai [æ]		a [a]		ao	au

One will probably have to tweak values to fit specific languages, but that shauld be OK as long as one picks the nearest suitable graphy.

That may of course be done to cut down on digraphs with consonants also!

Disabiguating

Clearly this scheme needs some means to disambiguate e.g. [lz] from [l̪]. There is a really simple solution: wherever two adjacent letters which could be a digraph belong to different graphies you put a period between them: lz is [l̪], but [lz] is l.z; kh is /ʔ/, but [kʰ] is k.h. This works because the punctuation character . (the period/full stop) is usually followed by whitespace, another punctuation character or the end-of-text; a period between two letters is then a pretty safe digraph-breaker! Moreover you can, when you are not really restricted to ASCII, use the mid dot (· U+00B7 or decimal 183, thus in Latin-1 and usable even on Yahoo groups...) instead of the low period, as Catalan does to distinguish ll [ʎ] from l·l [ll].

Secondary articulations

This also comes in handy to provide a means of symbolizing secondary articulations: you can e.g. use an for [ã] but a.n (or a·n) for [an].

Similarly lateral fricatives may be written by putting an l after the graphy for a fricative: sl [ɬ], ˈˈs.l/s·lˈˈ [sl], zsl [ɮ], zs.l/zs·l [zl].

Diphthongs and hiatus

Unfortunately you also need to distinguish not only diphthongs from vowel digraphs, but also diphthongs from vowels in hiatus. A reasonable solution is to use an apostrophe for hiatus: hi'atus is the Latin pronunciation of "hiatus", hi.atus (or hi·atus) is [hi͡atus] with a diphthong, and hiatus is [hɨtus]!

This can come in handy with consonants too: sy is [ɕ], s.y (or s·y) is [sʲ] and s'y is [sj] — if one really needs to distinguish all three.

A good thing I refrained from using the apostrophe as a letter! ;-)

Length indication

This is simple: just double the first letter of the digraph: seei is "se" [seː], the Swedish word for 'see', akkya is [acca], and addta is [ad̺d̺a].

Voiceless sonorants

Voiceless sonorants are written by putting an h before the graphy for the voiced counterpart: hw, hv, hl, hr, hn, hng etc.

It's probably a good idea to use hl, hlz etc. for voiceless lateral fricatives, as voiceless lateral approximants probably never are phonemic in the wild.

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That's all for now... --BPJ 11:18, 23 September 2011 (PDT)