Romic alphabet

Romic alphabet
Type	Alphabet
Languages	Proposed for English
Creator	Henry Sweet
Time period	19th century
Child systems	Influenced the original International Phonetic Alphabet

The Romic Alphabet, sometimes known as the Romic Reform, is a phonetic alphabet proposed by Henry Sweet. It descends from Ellis's Palæotype and English Phonotypic Alphabet, and is the direct ancestor of the International Phonetic Alphabet. In Romic every sound had a dedicated symbol, and every symbol represented a single sound. There were no capital letters; there were letters derived from small capitals, though these were distinct letters.

There were two variants, Broad Romic and Narrow Romic. Narrow Romic utilized italics to distinguish fine details of pronunciation; Broad Romic was cruder, and in it the vowels had their English "short" sounds when written singly, and their "long" sounds when doubled:

If the beginner has once learnt to pronounce a, e, i, o, u, as in glass, bet, bit, not, dull, he simply has to remember that long vowels are doubled, as in biit—"beat", and fuul—"fool", and diphthongs formed by the juxtaposition of their elements, as in boi—"boy" and hai—"high" [...]

Sweet adopted from Ellis and earlier philologists a method creating new letters by rotating existing ones, as in this way no new type would need to be cast:

There is, however, one simple method of forming new letters without casting new types, which is very often convenient. This is by turning the letters, thus - ə, ɔ. These new letters are perfectly distinct in shape, and are easily written. The ə was first employed by Schmeller to denote the final e-sound in the German gabe, &c. Mr. Ellis, in his ‘Palæotype,’ uses it to denote the allied English sound in but.

The IPA letter ⟨ɔ⟩ acquired its modern pronunciation and first use with this alphabet. He resurrected two Anglo-Saxon letters, ash ⟨æ⟩ and eth ⟨ð⟩, and borrowed the Greek letter theta ⟨θ⟩, which had the pronunciations they retain in the IPA. He used ⟨q⟩ for /ŋ/ and ⟨c⟩ for /tʃ/.

Aspiration is written ⟨kʜ⟩ etc. Dark L is a turned ʟ (mirror image of г).

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