Dania transcription
Dania is a transcription system commonly used in Denmark to describe the Danish language. It was invented by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen and published in 1890 in the magazine Dania, after which it was named.
Jespersen led an international conference in 1925 to establish an alternative to the International Phonetic Alphabet that approached the IPA but retained several elements of Dania transcription.
Consonant chart
For mixed voicing, one normally writes for final voicelessness and for initial voicelessness, with roman-type for fully voiceless. But there are two ligatures: > and >. Roman-type, etc. are fully voiced sounds which occur in dialects such as Bornholmsk. Note that roman typeface indicates a modally voiced sound with plosives, a voiceless sound with sonorants and laterals, and a partially voiceless sound with fricatives/approximants.Vowel chart
A mid dot may be added for length. The comma for stød combines with this to form the 'comma-punkt'.1925 Copenhagen conference
A conference held in Copenhagen in 1925 under the auspices of the Union Académique Internationale produced recommendations for an international phonetic alphabet that was a compromise between Dania transcription, the International Phonetic Alphabet, and other systems then in use. Members of the convention objected, for example, to the use of unrelated letters for palatal consonants in the IPA, opting instead for a characteristic curl to derive them, and they excluded the IPA letter altogether. The system is as follows:Phonetic transcription is demarcated by square brackets,, and transliteration or original orthography by parentheses overstruck with small circles, .
Long vowels are marked by a high dot,, and half-long vowels by a low dot,. Extra-long vowels are.
Stress is,, or bold as in the IPA. It may be lexical or prosodic.
Tone is indicated by staveless marks before the syllable, e.g. level, rising, falling, rising-falling, falling-rising, "waving". Additionally, and are used for the "simple" and "compound" tones of Norwegian and Swedish.
Syllabic is and non-syllabic ; for 'voiceless' and for 'voiced'. A diacritic
Nasal vowels are e.g..
Labialization is. The same diacritic turned 180°,, is used for 'unrounded'.
Dental consonants are e.g., retroflex either or.
Palatal consonants are marked, as in Dania transcription, with the looped tail of a cursive. This is found on both alveolar and velar . -loop loses its original tail, so that it looks like with a looped tail.
Palatalized consonants are either or. Finer shades may be indicated by, etc.
are retained for generic hushing fricatives, covering both and palatal -loop, -loop.
For fricatives, Greek, and are used. Cyrillic may be used for Greek to avoid confusion with the IPA vowel. Greek should have a flat top, as it often does in handwriting. Roman may be used for Greek.
is provided as an alternative to voiceless.
Dotless is used instead of IPA to avoid confusion with the many conventional uses of roman .
For the velar nasal, a variant with the tail is raised to was chosen to avoid clashing with diacritics placed under the letter.
Uvulars are small-cap roman,,,, and full-cap Greek for the fricatives.
Pharyngeals are and .
is glottal stop, weak aspiration, strong aspiration.
is a trill; is the sound written the same way in Czech. is a dorsal rhotic.
For clarity, ligatures may be used for affricates, as in the IPA of the time.
Unreleased plosives are marked with a raised square, e.g..
Clicks are indicated with a raised triangle over or after a letter.
Cyrillic was chosen for the high central unrounded vowel.
may be used in place of to avoid the confusion of the latter in italic typeface.
A closer vowel is or ; a more open vowel is or.