NATHAN CENTRAL The Personal Homepage of Nathan Richardson

▪ Home ▪ Links ▪ LDS Stuff ▪ Iconic Alphabet ▪ The Legend of Zelda		My Iconic Alphabet » 3 Standard Results Iconic Alphabet » Standard Results Below are a consonant chart and a vowel chart that show my final alphabet (that is, until I decide to change something). Follow this link to see a complete chart of the IPA alphabet. As you can see, it's a lot more complicated. I believe they were trying to catalog every possible phone, whereas no single language on earth uses each and every one of those sounds. The advantage of this iconic alphabet is that it is expandable to meet the needs of differing languages. For example, if a language uses the affricate 'ts', such as in Japanese, the new character is already predetermined by the guidelines of the iconic alphabet. The 'ts' character would look like an 'a' with a dot underneath. Note: In the velar column, you will see a second symbol for 'w'. This is there because there seem to be two ways to describe the phoneme /w/: position of the tongue (velar) or rounding of the lips (bilabial). I figure it's okay to have two symbols, especially since we have two fairly distinct symbols for 'a', as well as for 'g', depending on the font you are using. Areas for Improvement I would like to think of a different way of representing the voiced/unvoiced distinction. I would prefer not to have any diacritical marks, as I'd like the characters to be continuous. Diacriticals seem to clutter the letter (I imagine they might even slow down reading, but I haven't read anything that specifically says that). I originally indicated the nasals by a comma/slash placed in the same position as the unvoiced dot. To get rid of that diacritical, I switched to a curved ascender. I'd like to do something similar with the unvoiced letters. I also wonder if the vowels are a little too similar and therefore difficult to distinguish. The 'o' and the 'e' should probably be modified, perhaps tilted a little bit clockwise and counter-clockwise, respectively. « Prev