Wanya/Orthography

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Revision as of 08:39, 17 April 2013 by Fenhl (talk | contribs) (→‎Wanya alphabet: corrected name for tədeinyo, added info on Unicode)
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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 alphabet 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 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 tədeinyo, also called ɹənyo, or even less formally ɹətek). Like the oxikonyo, it is commonly placed on the letter Ǝ or ə. A letter with this mark is only written (and pronounced) when required by the Wanya syllable structure. It is usually romanized as parentheses around the letter in question.

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

The current Wanya font uses the Private Use Area code points U+E6D0 through U+E71F.

Wanya Alphabet
 0123456789ABCDEF
U+E6Dx
U+E6Ex
U+E6Fx
U+E70x
U+E71x   

The following proposal has been made to the UCSUR:

Wanya Alphabet
 0123456789ABCDEF
U+EAAx
U+EABx
U+EACx
U+EADx
U+EAEx
U+EAFx              

Both tables use the ASCII-friendly romanization as the Unicode letter names. A new version of the Wanya font which uses the UCSUR code points is in the works.

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.

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