Knowledge base · Part II — Sources, Conventions, Glossing, and Orthography · this topic as a network
11. The Latin Phonemic Transcription
What conventions govern the standard Latin-based transcription of the language's phonemes?
The phonemic principle
Is the transcription phonemic, phonetic, or morphophonemic?
The transcription adopted here is phonemic rather than phonetic or morphophonemic: non-obligatory phonetic alternations occurring across morpheme boundaries are generally not marked (Refsing 1986: 70).
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Phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences
What are the phoneme-to-grapheme correspondences and the vowel length status?
In the specific refrain n n kato, the grapheme n represents a nasalized vowel sound resembling [u] (Satō 2008: 286).
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The choice of c, and s before i
How is the palato-alveolar affricate written, and does s change before i?
The Latin character c is used universally to represent the voiceless affricate [tʃ] (Bugaeva 2022: 20.2).
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Relation to the IPA and to other romanizations in the literature
How does this transcription relate to the IPA and other romanization systems?
Refsing's transcription adapts the conventions used by Japanese Ainuists with minor personal modifications (Refsing 1986: 66). In the phonological description of Sakhalin Ainu, the grapheme h represents the phoneme /x/, which surfaces phonetically as [x], [ɕ], or [f] depending on the preceding vowel (Alonso de la Fuente 2022: 5.4).
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