Finno-Ugric transcription
Finno-Ugric transcription or the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet is a phonetic transcription or notational system used predominantly for the transcription and reconstruction of Uralic languages. It was first published in 1901 by Eemil Nestor Setälä, a Finnish linguist; it was somewhat modified in the 1970s.
FUT differs from the International Phonetic Alphabet notation in several ways, notably in exploiting italics or boldface rather than using brackets to delimit text, in the use of small capitals for devoicing, and in more frequent use of diacritics to differentiate places of articulation.
The basic FUT characters are based on the Finnish alphabet where possible, with extensions taken from Cyrillic and Greek orthographies. Small-capital letters and some novel diacritics are also used.
Unlike the IPA, which is usually transcribed in Roman typeface, FUT is transcribed in italic and bold typeface. Its extended characters are found in the Phonetic Extensions and Phonetic Extensions Supplement blocks. Computer font support is available through any good phonetics font, though lower-case and small-capital may not be visibly distinct in letters such as o where these look similar.
Vowels
Several vowel transcription systems have been used in FUT; the chart below is just one example. A vowel to the left of a dot is illabial ; to the right is labial. The open-mid row may be omitted for certain lects.| Front | Central | Back | |
| Close | • | • | • |
| Close-mid | • | • | • |
| Open-mid | • | • | • |
| Open | • | • | • |
In addition:' and ' may be used for close front and central rounded ' and '.' may be used for the vowel between ' and '; ' between ' and '; ' between ' and '.
- '
Consonants
The following table describes the consonants of FUT. A 'spirant' in this usage is a non-sibilant fricative. Under 'approximants', ' and their voiceless counterparts are 'semivowels', while ' are 'vibrationless rhotics'. Palatalized consonants are indicated with an acute accent. Only a few are shown in the table; the velar letters with an acute are commonly used for palatal consonants.When there are two consonants in a given space, the bottom row is voiced and the top row is voiceless; when there are three, the centre row is lenis or partially devoiced, and the top row is fortis or fully devoiced. Some sources add a second middle row for the plosives and affricates with small capitals of the voiceless consonants, so that a four way distinction between fortis, lenis, partially voiced, and fully voiced is maintained.
' are lateral fricatives. ' and ' in the table are also fricatives derived from letters for approximants.
Other sources have ' and ' for fricative ', ' for the uvular trills, and ' for the glottal stop '.
The Uralic languages transcribed with this system do not contain non-pulmonic consonants except paralinguistically, thus only clicks are supported by FUT. There are two conventions: a leftward arrow, for ' etc., and Greek letters, for ' etc. Nasal clicks can presumably be written ' etc. under the first convention.
Modifiers
From extremely short to extra-long, length of vowels and consonants is indicated as follows:| Example | Description | Use |
| ' | diaeresis above | 'Palatal' vowel; interdental consonant |
| ' | dot below | 'Velar' vowel; 'cacuminal' consonant |
| ' | diaeresis below | Uvular consonant |
| ' | macron | Long form of a vowel or consonant |
| ' | doubled character | Long form of a vowel or consonant |
| ' | left arrowhead below | Retracted form of a vowel or consonant |
| ' | right arrowhead below | Advanced form of a vowel or consonant |
| ' | circumflex below | Raised variant of a vowel |
| ' | caron below | Lowered variant of a vowel |
| ' | caron above | Fricative variant of an approximant; 'wide' variant of a sibilant |
| ' | breve | Shorter or reduced vowel |
| ' | breve below | Central vowel |
| ' | inverted breve below | Non-syllabic variant of a vowel |
| ' | acute accent | Palatalized variant of a consonant; may be moved to the right of letters with an ascender, as with '. |
| ' | small capital | Unvoiced or lenis variant of a sound |
| ' | superscripted character | Very short sound |
| ' | subscripted character | Coarticulation due to surrounding sounds, or intermediate sound |
| ' | rotated character | Reduced form of sound. Letters ambiguous when rotated 180° are rotated 90°, as with '. |
For diphthongs, triphthongs and prosody, Finno-Ugric transcription uses several forms of the tie or double breve:
- The triple inverted breve or triple breve below indicates a triphthong
- The double inverted breve, also known as the ligature tie, marks a diphthong
- The double inverted breve below indicates a syllable boundary between vowels
- The undertie is used for prosody
- The inverted undertie is used for prosody.
Differences from IPA
A major difference is that IPA notation distinguishes between phonetic and phonemic transcription by enclosing the transcription between either brackets or slashes. FUT instead uses italic typeface for the former and bold typeface for the latter.For phonetic transcription, numerous small differences from IPA come into relevance:
- For the voiced dental fricative, FUT uses a Greek delta ', while IPA uses the letter eth. In FUT, eth ' stands for an alveolar tap, IPA.
- FUT uses Greek chi χ for the voiceless velar fricative. In IPA, stands for a voiceless uvular fricative, while the velar counterpart is .
- FUT uses small caps for devoiced sounds, while IPA uses a ring diacritic.
| Sound | FUT | IPA |
| Alveolar tap | ' | |
| Voiced dental fricative | ' | |
| Voiceless alveolar lateral approximant | ' | |
| Velar lateral approximant | ' | |
| Voiceless alveolar nasal | ' | |
| Uvular nasal | '* | |
| Voiceless alveolar trill | ' | |
| Uvular trill | ' |
Encoding
The IETF language tags register as a subtag for text in this notation.Font support
Few system fonts support the small capitals. Support is available through any good phonetics font, such as Gentium, Andika, Noto, Segoe and EB Garamond, though lower-case and small-capital ᴄ, л, o, v, w and z may not be distinct in italic typeface and are rarely distinct in bold. DejaVu and EB Garamond do not support the stacked diacritics in '. EB Garamond includes the Unicode small capitals in its roman typeface but not in italic or bold, so automated formatting is applied, which makes the small capitals more distinct. Following are pairs of small capital and lower case in these fonts; the fonts must be installed on your computer or phone to display here.| Browser default font | italic | ᴄ c | ᴫ л | ᴏ o | ᴜ u | ᴠ v | ᴡ w | ᴢ z | š́ ž́ |
| Browser default font | bold | ᴄ c | ᴫ л | ᴏ o | ᴜ u | ᴠ v | ᴡ w | ᴢ z | š́ ž́ |
| Gentium | italic | ᴄ c | ᴫ л | ᴏ o | ᴜ u | ᴠ v | ᴡ w | ᴢ z | š́ ž́ |
| Gentium | bold | ᴄ c | ᴫ л | ᴏ o | ᴜ u | ᴠ v | ᴡ w | ᴢ z | š́ ž́ |
| Andika | italic | ᴄ c | ᴫ л | ᴏ o | ᴜ u | ᴠ v | ᴡ w | ᴢ z | š́ ž́ |
| Andika | bold | ᴄ c | ᴫ л | ᴏ o | ᴜ u | ᴠ v | ᴡ w | ᴢ z | š́ ž́ |
| Noto Serif | italic | ᴄ c | ᴫ л | ᴏ o | ᴜ u | ᴠ v | ᴡ w | ᴢ z | š́ ž́ |
| Noto Serif | bold | ᴄ c | ᴫ л | ᴏ o | ᴜ u | ᴠ v | ᴡ w | ᴢ z | š́ ž́ |
| Noto Sans | italic | ᴄ c | ᴫ л | ᴏ o | ᴜ u | ᴠ v | ᴡ w | ᴢ z | š́ ž́ |
| Noto Sans | bold | ᴄ c | ᴫ л | ᴏ o | ᴜ u | ᴠ v | ᴡ w | ᴢ z | š́ ž́ |
| Segoe UI | italic | ᴄ c | ᴫ л | ᴏ o | ᴜ u | ᴠ v | ᴡ w | ᴢ z | š́ ž́ |
| Segoe UI | bold | ᴄ c | ᴫ л | ᴏ o | ᴜ u | ᴠ v | ᴡ w | ᴢ z | š́ ž́ |
| EB Garamond | italic | ᴄ c | - л | ᴏ o | ᴜ u | ᴠ v | ᴡ w | ᴢ z | š́ ž́ |
| EB Garamond | bold | ᴄ c | - л | ᴏ o | ᴜ u | ᴠ v | ᴡ w | ᴢ z | š́ ž́''' |
Sample
This section contains some sample words from both Uralic languages and English along with comparisons to the IPA transcription.| Language | FUT | IPA | Meaning |
| English | 'ship' | ||
| English | 'ran' | ||
| English | 'bored' | ||
| Moksha | 'I sow' | ||
| Udmurt | 'to wash' | ||
| Forest Nenets | 'nostril' | ||
| Hill Mari | 'pine' | ||
| Skolt Sami | 'ermine' |