Proto-Austronesian Hebrew/Writing System

Headline text

	a	i	u	e	o	coda
ʔ	ア	イ	ウ	エ	オ	ー
K	カ	キ	ク	ケ	コ	ㇰ
S	サ	シ	ス	セ	ソ	ㇲ
T	タ	チ	ツ	テ	ト	ㇳ
N	ナ	ニ	ヌ	ネ	ノ	ㇴ
H	ハ	ヒ	フ	ヘ	ホ	ㇷ
M	マ	ミ	ム	メ	モ	ㇺ
Y	ヤ	乂 ()	ユ	也 ()	ヨ	ィ
R	ラ	リ	ル	レ	ロ	ㇽ
W	ワ	ヰ	于	ヱ	ヲ	ゥ
Q	カ̣	キ̣	ク̣	ケ̣	コ̣	N/A
G	ガ	ギ	グ	ゲ	ゴ	ㇰ
D	ダ	ヂ	ヅ	デ	ド	ㇳ
B	バ	ビ	ブ	ベ	ボ	ㇹ
P	パ	ピ	プ	ペ	ポ	ㇹ
L	ラ゜	リ゜	ル゜	レ゜	ロ゜	ㇿ
Ŋ	カ゚	キ゚	ク゚	ケ゚	コ゚	ン
C	サ゚	シ゚	ス゚	セ゚	ソ゚	ㇲ

Hiroyuki Fujisaka (藤坂 弘幸) and his Palauan workers are the only people ever to have seen actual Proto-Austronesian Hebrew (PAH) writing. As best as can be determined, it was Ugaritic cuneiform with some kind of vowel-pointing diacritics and a Brāhmī script, still very much like Aramaic. Since his death in 1944, however, only Fujisaka's notes remain of this language (オーストロネシアヘブライ祖語), extensive though they may be. Most linguistic documentation since that time has been using the Latin alphabet, but his special adaptation of katakana is preserved here for historical and documentary purposes.

Gemination	ッ
Diphthong-ending /e/	ェ
Diphthong-ending /o/	ォ
Reduplication	ヽ

The table to the right shows all the syllabograms Fujisaka-san assigned to PAH sounds. He explained that his system should taken as more consistent and uniform than modern Japanese (e.g., シ is /tu/ not /tsu/, フ is /hu/ not /fu/, etc.) The “plain” vowels begin with glottal-stops (instead of no onset), because PAH syllables must begin with a consonant. Fujisaka-san seems to have correctly recalled the obsolete /wi wu we/ characters, but not /yi ye/. Given the extreme rarity of the correct character, we have opted to use the kanji he mistakenly recollected. Unlike his colleagues working on Taiwanese kana and Ainu, he successfully used only monographs (gojūon/(五十音), avoided any digraphs (yōon/拗音) in his kana adaptation. Beyond the basic "50", there are three sets of characters using the dakuten/濁点 ("voiced"), three sets using the handakuten/半濁点 ("muddied"), and one dot-below set, as was done in Taiwan. There are three other full-sized katakana characters used in PAH. ン indicates a syllable-coda /ŋ/ (not the variable nasal of Japanese). ヽ is used for reduplication of the previous syllable.

A ー (chōonpu/長音符) lengthens the preceding vowel, but was used unevenly by Fujisaka-san. More often, he indicated vowel length by writing an overline above the syllable. Hence, dabarūma could be written ダバルーマ, but was usually transcribed as ダバル̅マ. ー is used very sparingly today.

There are also 15 small signs, all of which are subscripted, miniaturized versions of normal syllabograms. All but one indicate a coda consonant. ッ - a small /tu/ - indicates gemination of the following consonant. The "50" all make coda consonants with the small Cu version of themselves except

• 'T', whose coda-consonant version is ㇳ /to/, because little-ッ /tu/ is already means "gemination"
• The glottal-stop which cannot be geminated, but its vowel can be lengthened (as can any syllables') with ー
• 'Y' - which becomes an ィ /i/ when in the coda, even when geminated
• 'W' - which becomes an ゥ /u/ when in the coda, even when geminated

'H' can be in the coda but cannot be geminated. 'B' uses ㇹ (which one would expect to be /ho/). 'L' uses ㇿ (which one would expect to be /ro/). 'Q' could not be in the coda. 'Ŋ" is written in the coda with a ン, which is a nasal with variable place of articulation in standard Japanese. 'C' can be geminated or in the coda, but is geminated as /t.ts/ and in the coda is /s/. For example, パッス゚ is /pat.tsu/ and the construct state of アレス゚ /?a.re.tsu/ is アレㇲ /?a.res/. Coda consonants take their voicing from the next consonants, e.g. バㇰ could mean /bag/ or /bak/ depending on what comes next. It is unclear what happened at to such coda consonants at the end of a utterance.

The phonological process whereby /st/ becomes /ts/ is reflected in the spelling. For example, カ゚ㇲチ /ŋasti/ becomes カ゚シ゚ /ŋatsi/, both in pronunciation and spelling.

The one area wherein scholars today uniformly disagree with Fujisaka-san is over the short vowel /e/: エ was clearly a /ə/. It is disputed whether エ̅ was /e/ or /eː/. e and ē will be used in our documentation, for simplicity's sake.