CA11122004

CA11122004 is a writing system that I made on November 12, 2004. It's unclear what language this was intended for (I don't think I made a conlang that used this system); it incorporates some of English's phonotactics restrictions and has only English consonants, but has symbols for vowels that aren't in English (namely, the front rounded vowels, German ö and ü, IPA /y ʏ ø œ/; also it includes /ɔ/ and /ʍ/ which are in some English dialects but not mine). See the original (doesn't include any explanation)

Each syllable is one block, with a large element in the middle representing the vowel/syllable nucleus, and consonants are placed either inside the vowel shape or above or below it. Consonants in the syllable onset (before the vowel) are placed in the top half of the block; consonants in the syllable coda (after the vowel) are placed in the bottom half, though the sounds are not necessarily in order top-to-bottom. The blocks themselves are written left-to-write, like letters in ordinary English text.

Vowels

For the vowels that aren't closed shapes (ə and the syllabic consonants), any consonants that would normally go inside the vowel symbol instead go above or below it.

The vowels in price, choice, mouth, they, and low are diphthongs; these are spelled with a combination of a vowel and a glide (/j/ (the "y" sound in yes) or /w/): price = /ɑj/, choice = /oj/, mouth = /æw/, they = /ej/, low = /ow/.

There are no symbols for /ɜ/ (British English nurse) or /ɒ/ (British English lot, cloth), nor for indicating actual vowel length (i.e., time it takes to say the vowel), probably because I didn't know about those at the time.

Consonants

Placement of the symbols for consonants depends on the consonant, and whether it's in the onset of a syllable or the coda:

• The liquids /l ɹ/ and glides /j w/ always go outside the vowel symbol.
• In the syllable onset, /s/ (but not /z/ or /ʃ/) goes outside the vowel symbol. All other symbols go inside it. (This means that in native English words, only one onset consonant symbol will be inside the vowel symbol, because all onsets have the form optional s–optional other consonant–optional liquid or glide. There are a small number of English words where this doesn't work, such as any word starting with shn- or shm-.)
• The /h/ part of /ʍ/ goes inside the vowel symbol, whereas the /w/ part goes outside. I don't know why I made both a different symbol and also included the /h/ there.
• In the syllable coda, the consonants /s z t d θ/ go outside the vowel symbol if they come after a non-liquid-or-glide consonant (except in the cluster /nt/). In this case, the unvoiced symbol is used (that is, /z/ is written as if it were /s/, and /d/ is written as if it were /t/). These consonants are also written outside the vowel symbol if they're part of the suffixes -s or -ed, or the ordinal suffix -th.
• The clusters /mp nt ŋk sp sk/ are written inside the vowel symbol, and have special forms:

There doesn't appear to be any way to distinguish /ns/ (tense) from /nz/ (tens); perhaps /ns/ could be written as if it were /nts/, at least for those who don't pronounce tents and tense differently.

Example

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. /ðə kwɪk bɹæwn fɑks dʒʌmps owv.ɚ ðə lej.zi dɑg/

(TODO: make a vector graphics example, possibly an interactive IPA-to-CA11122004 converter.)