IPA and Mando'a

[Roly Yuva]

This is sort of like another "phonetic alphabet for Mando'a" thing, but when I saw pronunciation descriptions like [AHL-vair-day] in the Mando'a dictionary, I started creating my own dictionary in a Google Doc with IPA based pronunciations. If you didn't know, IPA stands for International Phonetic Alphabet, and it uses various characters to represent individual sounds that can be made with the human mouth in language. For instance, I represented al'verde in my Google Doc like /αlvɛəɹdeɪ/. It includes a link to both the dictionary here on mandoa.org, along with the WIkipedia page with a list of all the IPA sounds and characters that I used. So far I'm still only on the "c's", but I'm working on it still.

Here is the link, I just thought I'd share this after seeing all the "The Mando'a script doesn't properly represent the language" posts: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1i1o ... sp=sharing

[Vlet Hansen]

Handy! It's always nice to have less ambiguous references available.

[Roly Yuva]

Ok, in the Google Doc, whenever something like [AR-pat] popped up for pronunciation, I used æ as in 'hat' for the second 'a'. Is it more like ɐ as in 'nut', kind of how like the word "a" (like "I want 'a' hat") is typically pronounced like a 'short u' sound?

I'm also bringing this up because in the phonetic scripts that were made for Mando'a, I noticed there wasn't really an æ sound.

[Vlet Hansen]

I pronounce it more as the a in hat, so I'd agree with the ae choice.

[CoyoteSly]

I know it's a month late, but I went down the same road about a year ago. It takes a lot of effort, so oya for undertaking it! If you wanna do the whole thing to better familiarize yourself with the language I can heartily say it's effective for developing a feel for words. If you simply want an end result, here's the link to the Mando'a dictionary spreadsheet I made with a completed IPA column: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing . It's also got a couple other neat features like syllable count, stress pattern, and source for each word.

[CoyoteSly]

For specifically the /æ/ phoneme, the difficulty lies in guessing which words get the /æ/ sound instead of /a/. KT didn't distinguish them in her phonetic spellings. She gives the rule that an "a" between two consonants becomes an /æ/, so you could extrapolate from that rule even though the only explicit example is "arpat", but a lot of folks would rather dispense with the guesswork and merge /æ/ into /a/. I personally reaaaaaaally hate the /æ/ sound (Vlet is correct, it's like the "a" in "hat" or "cat", not the schwa /ə/ sound like in "*a* hat") so I'm in that camp of dropping /æ/ from my phonetic inventory.