Uralic Phonetic Alphabet
The Uralic Phonetic Alphabet or Finno-Ugric transcription system 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.
Unlike the International Phonetic Alphabet notational standard which concentrates on accurately and uniquely transcribing the phonemes of a language, as well as their phonetic quality. For this reason, it is not possible to automatically convert a UPA transcription into an IPA one.
The basic UPA 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.
General
Unlike the IPA, which is usually transcribed with upright characters, the UPA is usually transcribed with italic characters. Although many of its characters are also used in standard Latin, Greek, Cyrillic orthographies or the IPA, and are found in the corresponding Unicode blocks, many are not. These have been encoded in the Phonetic Extensions and Phonetic Extensions Supplement blocks. Font support for these extended characters is very rare; Code2000 and Fixedsys Excelsior are two fonts that do support them. A professional font containing them is Andron Mega; it supports UPA characters in Regular and Italics.Vowels
A vowel to the left of a dot is illabial ; to the right is labial.Other vowels are denoted using diacritics.
The UPA also uses three characters to denote a vowel of uncertain quality:
- ' denotes a vowel of uncertain quality;
- ' denotes a back vowel of uncertain quality;
- denotes a front vowel of uncertain quality
Consonants
The following table describes the consonants of the UPA. Note that the UPA does not distinguish voiced fricatives from approximants, and does not contain many characters of the IPA such as.When there are two or more consonants in a column, the rightmost one is voiced; when there are three, the centre one is partially devoiced.
ʔ denotes a voiced velar spirant.
ᴤ denotes a voiced laryngeal spirant.
Modifiers
For diphthongs, triphthongs and prosody, the Uralic Phonetic Alphabet 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
For phonetic transcription, numerous small differences from IPA come into relevance:
- UPA e, o denote mid vowels with no particular bias towards open or close, as are found in most Uralic languages. IPA, denote close-mid vowels in particular, common in Romance and West Germanic languages.
- Being designed for languages largely featuring vowel harmony, UPA has no simple way to denote a basic, backness-ambiguous schwa sound, IPA. ' denotes a reduced form of e, corresponding with IPA. A further backing diacritic must be appended, resulting in '.
- For the voiced dental fricative, UPA uses a Greek delta ', while IPA uses the letter eth. In UPA, eth ' stands for an alveolar tap, IPA.
- UPA uses Greek chi χ for the voiceless velar fricative. In IPA, stands for a voiceless uvular fricative, while the velar counterpart is .
- UPA uses small caps for voiceless or devoiced sounds, while in IPA, these frequently occur as distinct basic character denoting entirely separate sounds.
- UPA does not systematically distinguish approximants from fricatives. j may stand for both the palatal approximant or the voiced palatal fricative, v may stand for both the labiodental approximant or the voiced labiodental fricative, β may stand for the bilabial approximant, the voiced bilabial fricative, or in broad transcription even the labiovelar approximant.
- UPA lacks a series of palatal consonants: these must be transcribed by either palatalized alveolar or palatalized velar symbols. Thus ' may correspond to either IPA or.
| Sound | UPA | IPA |
| Close-mid back rounded vowel | ' | |
| Mid back rounded vowel | ' | or |
| Open-mid back rounded vowel | ' or ' | |
| Voiced dental fricative | ' | |
| Alveolar tap | ' | |
| Voiceless alveolar lateral approximant | ' | |
| Velar lateral approximant | ' | |
| Voiceless alveolar nasal | ' | |
| Uvular nasal | ||
| Voiceless alveolar trill | ʀ | |
| Uvular trill | ρ |
Sample
This section contains some sample words from both Uralic languages and English along with comparisons to the IPA transcription.| Language | UPA | IPA | Meaning |
| English | ' | 'ship' | |
| English | ' | 'ran' | |
| English | ' | 'bode' | |
| Moksha | ' | 'I sow' | |
| Udmurt | ' | 'to wash' | |
| Forest Nenets | 'nostril' | ||
| Hill Mari | ' | 'pine' | |
| Skolt Sami | '' | 'ermine' |