Miranto
Intro
Miranto is a unicase phonetic alphabet that I created for Esperanto. Like
Admente,
Miranto is a featural script, but it is more schematic than Admente. The letters' design draw
inspiration from Hangul, the constructed script for Korean, but like the Latin alphabet, the
letters are arranged in a linear fashion instead of blocks.
Consonants
Each letter has a design characteristic that indicate its place of articulation, manner of
articulation, and whether it is a voiced consonant.
Plosive consonants have two bars:
Bilabial consonants are represented by an inverted arch in the middle to represent a lip;
alveolar consonants are represented by a diagonal line from the top-left corner to bottom
right like the tongue touching the alveolar ridge, while velar consonants have a diagonal line
from the top-right corner to the bottom left, like how the back of the tongue tilts upwards
to touch the soft palate.
To turn them into fricatives, rotate the letters counterclockwise ninety degrees, so that the
vertical bars are now horizontal:
| → |
→ |
|
→ |
|
| f |
s |
ŝ |
ĥ |
h |
Note that the letter f
has a sharp corner instead of an arch to represent that it's a labiodental consonant, which
has a sharper sound that a bilabial one. In addition, the letter for ŝ
has a vertical bar to represent that its place of articulation (postalveolar)
is between s and ĥ. Finally, h has no particular place of articulation (i.e. it's a simple
breathing sound), so it is just two horizontal lines.
Affricates combine a plosive and a fricative, so these letters have a vertical bar on the left
and two horizontal bars:
Consonants that can be voiced have a caret added below them:
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| p b |
t d |
k g |
f v |
s z |
ŝ ĵ |
ĉ ĝ |
Nasal consonants have a caron added above the voiceless plosives:
Approximants have curves, and the trilled r has completely diagonal lines:
Finally, vowels have a single horizontal line and a curve whose position indicates the vowel's
position and openness; the vowel a has two diagonal lines to indicate that it is a central
vowel.
For the semivowels that occur at the end of a syllable such as -oj or -aŭ, Miranto has two
diacritics that follow the main vowels:
Example text
_
_
Ni ne povas pagi de fini la konstruon de tiu ĉu domo, Isabelle. Ni apenaŭ povas pagi ŝian
kuracadon. Mi nur ĝojas, ke ŝi fartos bone, sed… vi ne scias, kiom ĉi tiu loko signifas al ŝi.
Si estos korrompiĝita. Tamen… mi diras al ŝi, ke ni travivos. Mi diras al ŝi, ke ni povas pagi
por ĉion. Mi ne volas, ke ŝi fartu ion frenezan. Vi ne komprenas, Isabelle. Se ŝi sciiĝas, mi
ne certus, kion ŝi elektas.
Source: A dialog from "To the Moon"