Changes to the Sylabitsa document

Significant changes between September 2007 and January 2013:

  • Polished the default Sylabica font: made it narrower, improved kerning, fixed several bugs, added more punctuation.

  • Added a new consonant: w /w/ for foreign words like restawracja, kwiz. (Using u for it meant that the mapping from spelling to pronunciation was too ambiguous.)

  • Changed abstract spelling: ę→ẽ, ą→õ, ch→x, dz→ʒ, dź→ʒ́, dž→ǯ. (Internal consistency was deemed more important than resembling the standard orthography.)

  • Changed some vowel glyphs in Sylabica: ẽ↔õ, o↔ó, j. (Voiced consonants face left, and thus historically long vowels also face left, which is a better match than the opposite. The old j was too similar to ni in low resolutions.)

  • Changed letter ordering to suggest triples k, c, č; g, ʒ, ǯ; instead of leaving č, ǯ unpaired. (This makes the overall structure of consonants cleaner by having 4 sections: labial, coronal, velar, and liquid.)

  • Changed orthographic rules so that a consonant before j is never written as softened. (Deciding when to write it softened was too subtle.)

  • Clarified spelling of some words, e.g. budžet, v głõbi, rozmajyty, planetojda, mozajka. (This made either etymology or pronunciation more clear, at the cost of departing from the standard orthography.)

  • Listed rules for translation between the standard spelling and the abstract spelling.

  • Listed rules for transcription of selected foreign languages.

  • Removed precomposed syllables from Unicode allocation in Private Use Area. (Not needed with good software which can handle ligatures.)

  • Renamed Unicode characters so their names are based on English transcription instead of the abstract spelling. (More consistent with other scripts.)

  • Resolved how abbreviations are formed: they don’t necessarily consist of full syllables, and a middle dot is used as an abbreviation mark.

Significant changes between January 2013 and August 2013:

  • Abstract Spelling renamed to Etymologic Spelling.

  • Fifth major Sylabica revision:

    • The consonant inventory recognizes both etymologic and phonetic softening, with the preference to interpreting softening as etymologic when they agree. Etymologic softening is marked with a comma below in Etymologic Spelling, or an alternate letter shape with an additional horizontal line in Sylabica. Phonetic softening is marked with y, or a dot in Sylabica.

    • Summary of Etymologic Spelling changes: y→i, ỳ→ì, ẽ→ø, õ→ǿ, pi→p̒, bi→b̦, fi→f̦, vi→v̦, mi→m̦, ni→n̦, i→y, ć→ț, ʒ́→d̦, ś→ș, ź→z̦, ř→r̦, ł→l, l→l̦.

    • Reordered Sylabica vowels to go from low to high instead of from front to back. Reordered Sylabica consonants to mix liquids into the remaining groups (labial, coronal, velar).

  • Spelling made more etymologic for -zki, -zko, -ztvo, legki, Șl̦ǿzk.

  • A consonant before j which is softenable in core (and x, h) is again written as softened, except at a prefix boundary. (This looks better when the softness is an inherent aspect of the consonant rather than a separate marker, and is often more consistent with related words when the consonant is followed by i.)

  • Added transcription rules for more foreign scripts.

Significant changes between January 2014 and March 2014:

  • In English, renamed Sylabica to Sylabitsa.

  • Removed ly.

  • Reverted vowel order to go from front to back again.

  • Added transcription rules for even more foreign scripts. Various fixes in existing transcription rules.

  • Added transcription rules to English and Russian.

  • Changed Unicode encoding of the separator ʼ from U+2019 RIGHT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK to U+02BC MODIFIER LETTER APOSTROPHE.