Uralic_Phonetic_Alphabet
Uralic Phonetic Alphabet
Unlike the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) notational standard which concentrates on accurately and uniquely transcribing the phonemes of a language, the UPA is also used to denote the functional categories of a language, as well as their phonetic quality. For this reason, it is not possible to automatically convert a UPA transcription into an IPA one.
The basic UPA characters are based on the Finnish alphabet where possible, with extensions taken from Cyrillic and Greek orthographies. Small-capital letters and some novel diacritics are also used.
General
Unlike the IPA, which is usually transcribed with upright characters, the UPA is usually transcribed with italic characters. Although many of its characters are also used in standard Latin, Greek, Cyrillic orthographies or the IPA, and are found in the corresponding Unicode blocks, many are not. These have been encoded in the Phonetic Extensions and Phonetic Extensions Supplement blocks. Font support for these extended characters is very rare; Code2000 is one font which does support them.Vowels
A vowel to the left of a dot is illabial (unrounded); to the right is labial (rounded).| Palatal | Central | Velar | ||||
| Close |
| |||||
| Near-close | ||||||
| Close-mid | ||||||
| Mid | ||||||
| Open-mid | ||||||
| Near-open | ||||||
| Open | ||||||
Other vowels are denoted using diacritics; see the section below.
The UPA also uses three characters to denote a vowel of uncertain quality:
- denotes a vowel of uncertain quality;
- denotes a back vowel of uncertain quality;
- denotes a front vowel of uncertain quality
Consonants
The following table describes the consonants of the UPA. Note that the UPA does not distinguish voiced fricatives from approximates, and does not contain many characters of the IPA such as [ɹ].| Stop | Fricative | Lateral | Trill | Nasal | Click | |||||||||||||
| Bilabial | ||||||||||||||||||
| Labiodental | ||||||||||||||||||
| Dental | ||||||||||||||||||
| Alveolar | ||||||||||||||||||
| Dentipalatal (palatalised) | ||||||||||||||||||
| Prepalatal (palatalised and/or anterior) | ||||||||||||||||||
| Velar | ||||||||||||||||||
| Postvelar | ||||||||||||||||||
| Uvular | ||||||||||||||||||
When there are two or more consonants in a column, the rightmost one is voiced; when there are three, the centre one is partially devoiced.
Modifiers
| Character | Unicode | Image | Description | Use |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ạ | 0323 | dot below | Palatal variant of vowel | |
| a̮ | U+032F | breve below | Velar variant of a vowel | |
| ā | U+0304 | macron | Long form of a vowel; also by duplication | |
| a͔ | U+0354 | left arrowhead below | Advanced form of a vowel or consonant | |
| a͕ | U+0355 | right arrowhead below | Retracted form of a vowel or consonant | |
| a̭ | U+032D | circumflex below | Raised variant of a vowel | |
| a̬ | U+032C | caron below | Lowered variant of a vowel | |
| ă | U+0306 | breve | Shorter or reduced vowel | |
| a̯ | U+032F | inverted breve below | Non-syllabic, glide or semi-vowel | |
| ʀ | — | small capital | Unvoiced or partially voiced version of voiced sound | |
| i | — | superscripted character | Very short sound | |
| ə | — | subscripted character | Coarticulation due to surrounding sounds | |
| ᴞ | — | Rotated (180°) or sideways (−90°) | Reduced form of sound |
Sample use of UPA
This section contains some sample words from both Finno-Ugric languages and English (using Australian English) along with comparisons to the IPA transcription.| English | Language | UPA | IPA |
|---|---|---|---|
| ship | English | ʃɪp | |
| ran | English | ræn | |
| bored | English | boːd/boɹd (depends on accent) | |
| I sow | Moksha | ? |
External links
This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
Last updated on Wednesday September 17, 2008 at 17:59:14 PDT (GMT -0700)
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