User:Gilgamesh~enwiki/Marshallese transcription

This is an alternate orthography for the Marshallese language.

Background
My main issue with existing Marshallese orthographies is that they try to force a five vowel (aeiou) approach to transcription on a language where vowel phonemes are only distinguished by vowel openness, and not by frontness or roundedness. Marshallese in fact has only four vowels by vertical position: open, open-mid, close-mid and close. As such, transcribing vowels by horizontal articulation doesn't make much practical sense when the consonants are already clearly defined. The reason Marshallese vowels are written with horizontal distinctions like e/a/o is because of how the vowel phonemes change articulation between front, back or back rounded depending entirely on what consonants they neighbor.

But then I observed something&mdash;in many ways, Marshallese phonology is similar to Gaelic phonology. Buth Gaelic orthography manages to very clearly indicate its articulations while only using diacritics for short and long vowels. In Gaelic, consonants can either be "broad" (velarized) or "slender" (palatalized), and the vowels on either side of a consonant must agree because the CV and VC boundary must agree on pronunciation. And this is also true in Marshallese phonology, albeit with its three categories: palatalized consonant with front vowel, velarized consonant with back vowel, and labio-velarized with rounded back vowel. Though traditionally this distinction among consonants is phonemic, it occurred to me that, in spelling, these consonants could be indicated with fewer spellings and the vowels indicated by a variety of diphthongal spellings, and Marshallese could be easily written completely without diacritics and be entirely readable. The different consonantal articulations in Gaelic are also phonemic, but Gaelic writing gets by with this compromise. I hope what I'm talking about will soon become clear.

Some initial drafts of the spelling came up with a system that used absolutely no diacritics. However, even after pronunciation rules are studied, it was unintuitive to read in practice. So, I revised the system to use only a small handful of non-ASCII letters, all of which can be found in the Latin Extended-A Unicode block. Among the relatively elegant solutions I found was to use the Turkish dotted and dotless I, where I and ı are back vowels, and İ and i are front vowels.

Vowels
Though there are only four vowel phonemes, I employ 36 different vowel spellings. This is because there are three consonant categories on the left side of any vowel, and the same three consonant categories on the right side of any vowel. Since every Marshallese word must begin and end with a consonant phoneme, this arrangement works out. 4&times;3&times;3=36. Notice that i used not only all six vowel letters (aeıiou), but every separate diphthong combination among them. As a rule of thumb, the letters e/i neighbor a palatalized consonant, the letters a/ı neighbor a velarized consonant, and the letters o/u neighbor a labiovelarized consonant. e/a/o are the "low" letters, and i/ı/u are the "high" letters. Like so: As another rule of thumb, the close vowel is always spelt high or high-high, the close-mid vowel is always spelt high-low, the open-mid vowel is always spelt low-high, and the open vowel is always spelt low or low-low.

Consonants
Since my vowel spellings already clearly indicate the consonant category on either side of them, this transcription system's number of consonant spellings can actually be much fewer. For this table I also indicate the standard orthography for each consonant phoneme.