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 (unrounded); to the right is labial (rounded).
The UPA also uses three characters to denote a vowel of uncertain quality:
ɜ denotes a vowel of uncertain quality;
ᴕ denotes a back vowel of uncertain quality;
ᴕ̈ denotes a front vowel of uncertain quality
If a distinction between close-mid vowels and open-mid vowels is needed, the IPA symbols for the open-mid basic front unrounded and back rounded vowels, ⟨ɛ⟩ and ⟨ɔ⟩, can be used. However, in keeping with the principles of the UPA, the open-mid front rounded and back unrounded vowels are still transcribed with the addition of diacritics, as ⟨ɔ̈⟩ and ⟨ɛ̮⟩.
Consonants
The following table describes the consonants of the UPA. The UPA does not distinguish voiced fricatives from approximants, and does not contain many characters of the IPA such as [ɹ], [ɟ], or [ʒ].
When there are two or more consonants in a column, the rightmost one is voiced; when there are three, the centre one is lenis or partially devoiced. Small-capital ⟨ᴫ⟩ and lower-case ⟨л⟩ are distinct in italic typeface, which is the norm for phonetic notation.
ʔ denotes a glottal stop.
ᴤ denotes a voiced laryngeal spirant.
Modifiers
More information Example, Image ...
UPA modifier characters
Example
Image
Description
Use
ä
-
diaeresis above
Palatal (fully front) vowel
ạ
dot below
Palatal (fronted) variant of vowel
a̮
breve below
Velar (fully back or backed) vowel or variant of vowel
A major difference is that IPA notation distinguishes between phonetic and phonemic transcription by enclosing the transcription between either brackets [aɪpʰiːeɪ] or slashes /aipie/. UPA instead used italics for the former and half bold font for the latter.[3]
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 [e], [o] 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 [ə]. ə denotes a reduced form of e, corresponding with IPA [e̽]. A further backing diacritic must be appended, resulting in ə̑. (This may also stand for a reduced form of e̮, corresponding with IPA [ɤ̽]; a distinction rarely encountered in practice.)
UPA uses small caps for voiceless or devoiced sounds (ᴀ ʙ ᴅ ɢ ᴇ…), while in IPA, these frequently occur as distinct basic characters denoting entirely separate sounds (e.g. [ʙɢʟɴ]).
UPA lacks a series of palatal consonants: these must be transcribed by either palatalized alveolar or palatalized velar symbols. Thus ń may correspond to either IPA [nʲ] or [ɲ].
This section contains some sample words from both Uralic languages and English (using Australian English) along with comparisons to the IPA transcription.
Posti, Lauri; Itkonen, Terho (1973). "FU-transkription yksinkertaistaminen. Az FU-átírás egyszerűsítése. Zur Vereinfachung der FU-Transkription. On Simplifying of the FU-transcription". Castrenianumin Toimitteita (7). University of Helsinki. ISBN951-45-0282-5. ISSN0355-0141.
Setälä, E. N. (1901). Über transskription der finnisch-ugrischen sprachen (in German). Helsingfors, Leipzig. p.47.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
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