The Rheinische Dokumenta () is a
phonetic writing system developed in the early 1980s by a working group of academics, linguists, local language experts, and local language speakers of the
Rhineland.
It was presented to the public in 1986 by the
Landschaftsverband Rheinland
North Rhine-Westphalia (german: Nordrhein-Westfalen, ; li, Noordrien-Wesfale ; nds, Noordrhien-Westfalen; ksh, Noodrhing-Wäßßfaale), commonly shortened to NRW (), is a state (''Land'') in Western Germany. With more than 18 million inhabi ...
.
It offers a uniform common notation of almost every
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
spoken in the
Lower Rhine area, the western and central Rhineland, the
Berg region, the
Westerwald
The Westerwald (; literally 'Western forest') is a low mountain range on the right bank of the river Rhine in the German federal states of Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia. It is a part of the Rhenish Massif ( or Rhenish ...
,
Eifel, and
Hunsrück
The Hunsrück () is a long, triangular, pronounced upland in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It is bounded by the valleys of the Moselle-Saar (north-to-west), the Nahe (south), and the Rhine (east). It is continued by the Taunus mountains, past ...
mountain regions, plus the areas surrounding the
Nahe and
Moselle Rivers.
It encompasses the
dialects of cities such as
Aachen
Aachen ( ; ; Aachen dialect: ''Oche'' ; French and traditional English: Aix-la-Chapelle; or ''Aquisgranum''; nl, Aken ; Polish: Akwizgran) is, with around 249,000 inhabitants, the 13th-largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia, and the 28th- ...
,
Bingen,
Bonn
The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr ...
,
Cologne,
Duisburg,
Düsseldorf,
Eschweiler
Eschweiler (, Ripuarian: ) is a municipality in the district of Aachen in North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany on the river Inde, near the German-Belgian-Dutch border, and about east of Aachen and west of Cologne.
History
* Celts (fi ...
and
Eschweiler
Eschweiler (, Ripuarian: ) is a municipality in the district of Aachen in North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany on the river Inde, near the German-Belgian-Dutch border, and about east of Aachen and west of Cologne.
History
* Celts (fi ...
,
Essen,
Eupen
Eupen (, ; ; formerly ) is the capital of German-speaking Community of Belgium and is a city and municipality in the Belgian province of Liège, from the German border (Aachen), from the Dutch border (Maastricht) and from the "High Fens" ...
,
Gennep,
Gummersbach
Gummersbach (; ksh, Jummersbach) is a town in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, being the district seat of the Oberbergischer Kreis. It is located east of Cologne.
History
In 1109 Gummersbach was mentioned in official documents fo ...
,
Heinsberg,
Karlsruhe,
Kaiserslautern,
Kerkrade and
Herzogenrath,
Cleves
Kleve (; traditional en, Cleves ; nl, Kleef; french: Clèves; es, Cléveris; la, Clivia; Low Rhenish: ''Kleff'') is a town in the Lower Rhine region of northwestern Germany near the Dutch border and the River Rhine. From the 11th century ...
,
Koblenz,
Limburg,
Ludwigshafen,
Luxembourg,
Maastricht,
Mainz,
Malmedy
Malmedy (; german: Malmünd, ; wa, Måmdiy) is a city and municipality of Wallonia located in the province of Liège, Belgium.
On January 1, 2018, Malmedy had a total population of 12,654. The total area is 99.96 km2 which gives a popula ...
,
Mönchengladbach
Mönchengladbach (, li, Jlabbach ) is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located west of the Rhine, halfway between Düsseldorf and the Dutch border.
Geography Municipal subdivisions
Since 2009, the territory of Möncheng ...
,
Nijmegen
Nijmegen (;; Spanish and it, Nimega. Nijmeegs: ''Nimwèège'' ) is the largest city in the Dutch province of Gelderland and tenth largest of the Netherlands as a whole, located on the Waal river close to the German border. It is about ...
,
Oberhausen,
Prüm
Prüm () is a town in the Westeifel (Rhineland-Palatinate), Germany. Formerly a district capital, today it is the administrative seat of the ''Verbandsgemeinde'' ("collective municipality") Prüm.
Geography
Prüm lies on the river Prüm (a tri ...
,
Raeren
Raeren () is a municipality of east Belgium located in the Walloon province of Liège. It was part of Germany until the First World War, after which it became part of Belgium. It is one of several towns in eastern Belgium which predominantly s ...
,
Saarbrücken,
Siegen,
Trier
Trier ( , ; lb, Tréier ), formerly known in English as Trèves ( ;) and Triers (see also Names of Trier in different languages, names in other languages), is a city on the banks of the Moselle (river), Moselle in Germany. It lies in a valley b ...
,
Venlo,
St. Vith
St. Vith (german: Sankt Vith ; french: Saint-Vith ; lb, Sankt Väit ; wa, Sint-Vit) is a city and municipality of East Belgium located in the Walloon province of Liège. It was named after Saint Vitus.
On January 1, 2006, St. Vith had a total ...
,
Wiesbaden,
Wipperfürth
310px, Map of the city
250px, Town hall
Wipperfürth () is a municipality in the Oberbergischer Kreis of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, about 40 km north-east of Cologne, and the oldest town in the Bergischen Land.
History
The eldest ...
,
Wuppertal,
Xanten,
and many more.
Rheinische Dokumenta was designed to be easily readable for dialect speakers educated in German writing, but there are some differences that make it quite distinct from the usual ways of writing the dialects: There is no doubling of consonants to mark short vowels, and there are extra
diacritical marks. The German letters and are spelled and , German is spelled when it indicates a pronunciation, German is spelled . These spellings appear in other Germanic languages as well, but Rhinelanders are generally not accustomed to them.
Letters
The Rheinische Dokumenta uses the
letters
Letter, letters, or literature may refer to:
Characters typeface
* Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech; any of the symbols of an alphabet.
* Letterform, the graphic form of a letter of the alpha ...
of today's
ISO basic Latin alphabet
The ISO basic Latin alphabet is an international standard (beginning with ISO/IEC 646) for a Latin-script alphabet that consists of two sets (uppercase and lowercase) of 26 letters, codified in various national and international standards and ...
, without , , , , , though it has the
digraphs , , ,
trigraph . In addition, the three common
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
Umlauted letters are used: , , , and ten more letters, digraphs, and a trigraph, each having diacritical marks:
:
Each letter, digraph, or trigraph is strictly representing one
phone
A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into ele ...
. Most letters represent the usual sounds for which they are used in the
German alphabet
German orthography is the orthography used in writing the German language, which is largely phonemic orthography, phonemic. However, it shows many instances of spellings that are historic or analogous to other spellings rather than phonemic. Th ...
or, slightly less so, in the
Dutch alphabet
Dutch commonly refers to:
* Something of, from, or related to the Netherlands
* Dutch people ()
* Dutch language ()
Dutch may also refer to:
Places
* Dutch, West Virginia, a community in the United States
* Pennsylvania Dutch Country
People ...
or that of the
Luxembourgish language. Several letters are ambiguous in these languages, such as voiced consonants which
lose their voice when appearing at the end of a word. These ambiguities are avoided writing Rheinische Dokumenta; despite the fact that word stems may change their printed appearance, when
declined or
conjugated, always the most phonetically correct letters, digraphs, or trigraphs are being used.
Digraph and trigraph unambiguity
As opposed to
Dutch, the combination of followed by does not occur in the languages for which Rheinische Dokumenta was made. Thus, since is not otherwise used in Rheinische Dokumenta, both and are unambiguous, especially the underlined letter combinations, and the ones having an arch below.
Only the digraph has some ambiguity. An may occur at the end of a
syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of Phone (phonetics), speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered t ...
, but only a few dialects allow a syllable initial (g) after a syllable final . While at syllable joints is frequent in German, most languages that can use Rheinische Dokumenta have or instead in almost all instances. The authors of Rheinische Dokumenta suggest using the single letter
eng instead of the digraph when possible.
Letter case
Though not defined in the original specification,
[ Peter Honnen (presented following the previous works of Fritz Langensiepen): ''Rheinische Dokumenta: Lautschrift für Rheinische Mundarten, Mundartdokumentation im Rheinland''. Rheinland-Verlag, Köln, 2nd edition, 1987, ] upper case letters can be used. While some authors do not use them at all, others start sentences with capitals or capitalise names, and few use capital initial letters on each
substantive and
noun, as
standard German writing does.
Accents
Stress and the
tonal accents are usually ignored when writing in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are
diacritics to indicate them, but since they are seen to considerably hamper readability, make prints ugly, and are hardly necessary to facilitate understanding, they are seldom used. Some dialects do not have tonal accent anyway. For the other ones, there are only a very few
word pairs or triplets having identical unaccented Rheinische Dokumenta spellings but different tonal or stress accents.
Also, other
prosody, such as the "melody" of sentence, which carries
semantic information in many Rheinisch languages,
[Ferdinand Münch: .]
https://archive.org/stream/grammatikderrip00mngoog#page/n18/mode/1up (November 5, 2009) is not preserved in Rheinische Dokumenta writing.
Vowels
Vowels come in two variants, short and long. That many dialects feature three distinct vowel lengths is ignored, as doing so does not create any ambiguities and makes reading easier. Short vowels are represented by single letters, long vowels are represented by the same letters doubled to indicate lengthening.
Monophthongs
Rheinische Dokumenta can write 25 monophthongs.
Short monophthongs
There are 14 short vowels in the languages that the script was designed for, 13 of which are representable in Rheinische Dokumenta:
The "e̩" is , a
schwa. There is no long version of "e̩". Although a schwa usually cannot carry word accent or stress, in some dialects there are exceptions. Words having only schwas do have their stress on schwas, and they can receive the main stress within a sentence as well. The
Colognian
Colognian or Kölsch (; natively ''Kölsch Platt'') is a small set of very closely related dialects, or variants, of the Ripuarian group of dialects of the Central German group. These dialects are spoken in the area covered by the Archdiocese a ...
word (in Rheinische Dokumenta writing) is an example.
= The schwa "e̩r"
=
There is another schwa. It does not have a corresponding
grapheme
In linguistics, a grapheme is the smallest functional unit of a writing system.
The word ''grapheme'' is derived and the suffix ''-eme'' by analogy with ''phoneme'' and other names of emic units. The study of graphemes is called ''graphemics' ...
in Rheinische Dokumenta. It could be noted in
IPA
IPA commonly refers to:
* India pale ale, a style of beer
* International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation
* Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound
IPA may also refer to:
Organizations International
* Insolvency Practitioners A ...
as an unstressed short , in some dialects and positions also as an unstressed short . Some publications call it a "vocalic r". It is almost always followed by a
glottal stop. Glottal stops are not noted in Rheinische Dokumenta, even though they are
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west ...
s occasionally having
minimal pairs and a length attribute. Since this schwa almost always corresponds to the digraph "er" ending a word or a separable syllable prefix of Standard German orthography, most users of Rheinische Dokumenta positionally print "er", or "e̩r", respectively, for increased readability in an attempt of courtesy towards their readers who read German more fluently than Rheinische Dokumenta. From the standpoint of phonological writing, this is incorrect.
Long monophthongs
There are 12 long vowels. For each short vowel with the exception of the
schwa "e̩", there is a corresponding long vowel:
Diphthongs
In Rheinische Dokumenta, diphthongs are simply denoted as a sequence of the two monophthongs heard and spoken jointly. For instance, the English word "
boy
A boy is a young male human. The term is commonly used for a child or an adolescent. When a male human reaches adulthood, he is described as a man.
Definition, etymology, and use
According to the ''Merriam-Webster Dictionary'', a boy is "a ...
" would be spelled: "bǫi" in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are occasions, when two monophthongs need to be written together without forming a diphthong; that means they are pronounced separately with either a
glottal stop or an intervocalic joiner consonant "j" in between. There is no written distinction between these cases, although it is not forbidden to write the character "j" for clarity. The number of diphthongs existing in a dialect is far less than each possible combination of two vowels, thus there are not very many ambiguities when taking syllable structure into account.
Assimilation and
coarticulation Coarticulation in its general sense refers to a situation in which a conceptually isolated speech sound is influenced by, and becomes more like, a preceding or following speech sound. There are two types of coarticulation: ''anticipatory coarticulat ...
are predominant in most of the languages written using Rheinische Dokumenta, thus diphthong
articulation may deviate somewhat from the articulation of the isolated monophthongs. Also, depending on languages, the lengths of their diphthongs may vary considerably between the extremes of as short as a typical short monophthong to longer than the sum of two long monophthongs. Varying lengths of diphthongs are not noted in Rheinische Dokumenta, which at least does not create ambiguities within a dialect.
Other
There are no triphthongs, although diphthongs can be followed by schwas in some languages. If, for instance, Rheinische Dokumenta was used in writing
Westphalian, triphthongs would be written in a manner analogous to the diphthongs, using three adjacent letters of vocals.
Consonants
Since most dialects follow the
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
, and
Lower Franconian, rule of
final-obstruent devoicing, voiced consonants cannot, or hardly ever, appear at the end of a word or sentence. This is one of the major differences between Rheinische Dokumenta and Standard German writing, since Standard German orthography tries to keep word
stems unaltered, even if pronunciation varies with suffixes, endings, or
phonological rules. If there is
assimilation or other
sandhi
Sandhi ( sa, सन्धि ' , "joining") is a cover term for a wide variety of sound changes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries. Examples include fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of one sound depending on near ...
across word boundaries which yields a consonant voiced at a word end, some authors write them as
contractions or join the words with a
dash "-" to avoid having final voiced consonants.
Unvoiced plosives
Voiced plosives
Nasals
Though some dialects vary the duration of nasal consonants considerably, they are not doubled to indicate extended length when written, while vocals are. Though this never creates ambiguities within a language, comparison of languages is less supported. A good argument against doubling is that often nasal durations depend on speaker, style of speech, and
prosody rather than being a characteristic of a word or a dialect, although that is not always so.
The letter
eng (
ŋ
) is recommended rather than the
ng
digraph when technically feasible. This recommendation is not always followed in an attempt to create prints closer resembling Standard German or Dutch. Though the phoneme cannot appear at the beginning of a syllable, upper case glyphs exist for
all caps
In typography, all caps (short for "all capitals") refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters, for example: "THIS TEXT IS IN ALL CAPS". All caps may be used for emphasis (for a word or phrase). They are commonly seen in ...
and
small caps print.
Liquids or approximants
Some dialects vary the duration of liquids. With the exception of
Ripuarian dialects
Ripuarian ( ; also ''Ripuarian Franconian''; german: Ripuarisch, , ''ripuarische Mundart, ripuarischer Dialekt, ripuarisch-fränkische Mundart, Ribuarisch'', nl, Ripuarisch , ''Noordmiddelfrankisch'') is a German dialect group, part of the We ...
, this is hardly a characteristic of words, but prosodic. It is not noted when writing Rheinische Dokumenta.
There is no distinction between the different
phone
A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into ele ...
s represented by
l
, and
r
. They are nearly
allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...
s; most often a specific dialect uses one, but not the other phone of a pair.
Both
ṛ
, and
ṙ
, are rarely used since these sounds occur in few dialects only.
Voiced fricatives
The letter
z
is recommended to be used as a replacement of
ṣ
, when
ṣ
is technically not available. This resembles the use of
z
in Dutch writing.
Unvoiced fricatives
The variations
Sch
, and
Ch
, are used for
title case
Title case or headline case is a style of capitalization used for rendering the titles of published works or works of art in English. When using title case, all words are capitalized, except for minor words (typically articles, short prepositions ...
, while
SCH
, and
CH
, are used for
all caps
In typography, all caps (short for "all capitals") refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters, for example: "THIS TEXT IS IN ALL CAPS". All caps may be used for emphasis (for a word or phrase). They are commonly seen in ...
and
small caps.
Few West- and Central
Ripuarian languages, most notably
Colognian
Colognian or Kölsch (; natively ''Kölsch Platt'') is a small set of very closely related dialects, or variants, of the Ripuarian group of dialects of the Central German group. These dialects are spoken in the area covered by the Archdiocese a ...
, have the non-
allophone
In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is a set of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''or signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, (as in '' ...
s and
[Whether or not the ]IPA
IPA commonly refers to:
* India pale ale, a style of beer
* International Phonetic Alphabet, a system of phonetic notation
* Isopropyl alcohol, a chemical compound
IPA may also refer to:
Organizations International
* Insolvency Practitioners A ...
glyph really is the correct notation is disputable, see voiceless palatal-velar fricative
The ''sj''-sound ( sv, sj-ljudet ) is a voiceless fricative phoneme found in most dialects of the sound system of Swedish. It has a variety of realisations, whose precise phonetic characterisation is a matter of debate, but which usually featur ...
. Both are written
sch
in Rheinische Dokumenta. The associated
phone
A telephone is a telecommunications device that permits two or more users to conduct a conversation when they are too far apart to be easily heard directly. A telephone converts sound, typically and most efficiently the human voice, into ele ...
s are to a large extent positionally distinguishable and clearly
articulated
An articulated vehicle is a vehicle which has a permanent or semi-permanent pivot joint in its construction, allowing it to turn more sharply. There are many kinds, from heavy equipment to buses, trams and trains. Steam locomotives were somet ...
differently. Nevertheless they are acoustically hard to distinguish, in part due to
coarticulation Coarticulation in its general sense refers to a situation in which a conceptually isolated speech sound is influenced by, and becomes more like, a preceding or following speech sound. There are two types of coarticulation: ''anticipatory coarticulat ...
, at times even for natives. So the designers of Rheinische Dokumenta choose to consider their differentiation unnecessary or marginal.
Typographical considerations
Rheinische Dokumenta has several
diacritical marks, some of which have their
typographical
Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable and appealing when displayed. The arrangement of type involves selecting typefaces, point sizes, line lengths, line-spacing (leading), and ...
peculiarities.
Umlauts can be seen as their counterparts in German, or
Latin script, typography.
The "
central hook below", which is being used to denote openness of the vowels ą̈, ǫ, ǫ̈. respectively, could be confused with the
ogonek. In fact, it is different. While the ogonek is to be placed somewhat off the optical center of the glyph it goes with, the Rheinische Dokumenta hook explicitly goes to its center. Thus it gives another impression and does not resemble the ogonek. Most Rheinische Dokumenta prints choose it to be slightly more angular, longer, and thus appear bolder than ogoneks usually are.{{Citation needed, date=May 2019
The "
center dot below" may not always be available. Using
z
as a replacement for
ṣ
is recommended in such cases, resembling Dutch writing. There are no such replacements or recommendations for the letters
ạ
, and
ṛ
, respectively, which are comparatively much less used.
When the "
horizontal bar below" is not available, using the glyph
ə
as a replacement for
e̩
, when possible, is recommended in such cases.
The phoneme denoted by
ŋ
in print, alternately spelt
ng
, never appears at the beginning of a syllable, word, or sentence. Yet its upper case version could be used in
all caps
In typography, all caps (short for "all capitals") refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters, for example: "THIS TEXT IS IN ALL CAPS". All caps may be used for emphasis (for a word or phrase). They are commonly seen in ...
or
small caps type.
The two variations of
sch
, and the three variations of
ch
, when written in
title case
Title case or headline case is a style of capitalization used for rendering the titles of published works or works of art in English. When using title case, all words are capitalized, except for minor words (typically articles, short prepositions ...
, usually have only their 1st character uppercased, when used in all caps or small caps, however, each letter is converted to upper case.
Unicode
Rheinische Dokumenta cannot currently be fully written in
Unicode but proposals are underway to have missing pieces added.
Rheinische Dokumenta is part of the Latin character set of Unicode, and thus part of its Basic Multilingual
Plane (Unicode)
In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecimal ...
. It is to a large extent covered by single
code points. While unaccented characters do that anyway, even some of the characters having
diacritical marks nevertheless occupy only one character position in a text stream in their
normalized form.
References
External links
Unicode combining diacritials
Phonetic alphabets
German phonology
Latin alphabets
Rhineland