Talk:Uralic Phonetic Alphabet

Draft enhancement
I have a draft version of enhancements to this article over at User:Cassowary/Uralic phonetic alphabet. I’m basing it on a PDF I found on the web an email to the CONLANG mailing list, because I don’t know much else. Please help if you can! In particular, I welcome criticisms and corrections of inaccuracy, because I don’t really know anything more about it.

(Don’t fill in the images just yet though, unless it’s to link to pre-existing sources. I don’t want to duplicate already-existing info.)

—Felix the Cassowary 11:06, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

Copied from draft working talk page
''The following content was originally on the draft's talk page in my userspace User talk:Cassowary/Uralic phonetic alphabet and has been copied here for context. (It's still there.)''

The content here is currently based on Uralic Phonetic Alphabet, Finno-Ugric transcription, Re: Questions about Hungarian, by Racsko Tamas to the CONLANG mailing list, and Uralic Phonetic Alphabet characters for the UCS.

Copyedit comments
Hi Cassowary - congrats, some very nice work done here. Hope you don't mind,


 * Of course I don’t, I thought I made it very clear any and all help was welcome :)

but as per your invitation over at Talk:WikiProject Writing systems I've taken the liberty to copyedit your draft and make some amendments/suggestions for your consideration. As I've only passing familiarity with UPA, I've not really reviewed the detail of your representation of UPA itself but rather have just reviewed your introductory and explanatory text. A couple of other comments:
 * where you say "the UPA is used to denote the functional categories of a language at the same time as their phonetic quality", it is not clear to me what is meant. You may need to explain further what "functional categories of a language" are, and how UPA represents them whilst IPA does not.


 * Indeed, that is rather funny... It's almost word-for-word from one of the sources, and I think I understand what it means (there was an example provided, something like Hungarian ' vs ' compared with vs ), but I want to confirm that with someone before I make the changes.


 * it would be helpful to provide some examples of UPA transcription of Finno-Ugric words to show how the system works. It would also be useful to provide a few side-by-side comparisions of some standard English words (perhaps in RP?) transcribed into UPA, and then IPA, so the differences can be seen.


 * I certainly have plans for that; I was planning on doing it in Australian English though. I'm more familiar with it, and I think that with its non-back rounded vowels and distinctions based solely on length, it's probably more suited to the UPA than RP is.

Otherwise, this is coming along just fine and already is a great improvement on the existing article - well done! Cheers, --cjllw | TALK  01:51, 2005 September 7 (UTC)
 * some instructions or pointers to the reader on how to go about augmenting their browser fonts so the chars display might help - I think there is even an article out there somewhere about this, but I can't recall it at the moment.


 * Ah yes, I do mention Code2000 in the text, but I think some other people have missed it, so I mean to make that clearer.


 * Thanks for your help!


 * —Felix the Cassowary (User talk:Cassowary) 03:23, 7 September 2005 (UTC)

Put up
I think I've done about all I can do, so I made the changes live. It's far from perfect, but I'm pretty sure it's a damn sight better than what we had. —Felix the Cassowary ( ɑe hɪː jɐ ) 05:30, 23 September 2005 (UTC)

ᴢ and z
I wonder how you can distinguish the small capital ᴢ from the lowercase z. They both look so similar… Tohuvabohuo (talk) 23:01, 29 December 2010 (UTC)
 * By means of different typefaces. In Saami dictionary by Itkonen half-voiced z is printed with oblique typeface, while voiced z is in italic, that is z vs z.--Lüboslóv Yęzýkin (talk) 20:35, 11 July 2015 (UTC)

Redirects that are not explained
In 2014, user:StringTheory11 (now retired) created a number of redirects to this articles, some of which, such as "ᴖ" and "ᴗ", are not explained here. In Setälä, I found a discussion of "ᴖ" (p. 47, §5), but none of "ᴗ". ◄ Sebastian 00:17, 17 January 2019 (UTC)
 * It's linked here from the artivle on the Unicode block Phonetic Extensions; chasing the Unicode documentation there shows its was used in place of ᴖ by fi:Eliel Lagercrantz in his Sami dialect dictionary. This is nonstandard, I believe. -- Trɔpʏliʊm • blah 13:21, 7 June 2024 (UTC)

Please add an explanation for the UPA is also used to denote the functional categories of a language
It's been mentioned before but the UPA is also used to denote the functional categories of a language, as well as their phonetic quality is not explained in any form. It would be good if this was explained, as, if true, it is a fascinating feature. Danielklein (talk) 01:39, 27 February 2019 (UTC)


 * I second this and have added a to the text.  —  AjaxSmack  00:58, 8 May 2020 (UTC)


 * The user who wrote that part hasn't been active for more than nine years now, so it's unlikely they'll ever return and clarify it; however, I suspect that morphophonological features such as vowel harmony are meant. It's oddly phrased, I grant that. What do you think? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 03:11, 24 July 2020 (UTC)

Misaligned vowel chart
I don't know if this happens for everyone, but my phone makes the vowel chart look misaligned, and when I rotate my phone 90 degrees, it looks (slightly) better Muonium777 (talk) 10:57, 17 October 2021 (UTC)

Phonetic terminology
Plosives and nasals are both stops. Is there any reason why plosives are refered to here as stops and nasals as nasals? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rueter (talk • contribs) 10:06, 12 January 2022 (UTC)

Moksha example
vəďa·n (source Paasonen's Mordwinisches Wörterbuch 1996: 2645b)

There is a discrepancy between the source form verses the example given in the article ‹və̂ďän›. In the Paasonen source, the first vowel is a middle vowel, slightly fronted, but the unsourced example word ‹və̂ďän› shows backing due to the turned breve above the schwa. The second vowel is also problematic -- in the original, the second vowel is shown as back, as it is followed by a non-palatal ‹-n›. The diaeresis above in the unsourced example shows a front vowel. Since the IPA form is presumably based on the unsourced Moksha form. I suggest that you use the sourced Moksha form from Paasonen's dialect dictionary and adjust the IPA equivalent. Rueter (talk) 17:16, 11 August 2023 (UTC)