Teuthonista is a

phonetic transcription Phonetic transcription (also known as Phonetic script or Phonetic notation) is the visual representation of speech sounds (or ''phonetics'') by means of symbols. The most common type of phonetic transcription uses a phonetic alphabet, such as the ...

system used predominantly for the transcription of (High) German dialects. It is very similar to other Central European transcription systems from the early 20th century. The base characters are mostly based on the Latin alphabet, which can be modified by various diacritics.

History

The name ''Teuthonista'' goes back to the Journal ''Teuthonista'', in which the transcription system was presented in 1924/25.

Symbols

Most of the characters derive from the Latin or Greek alphabet, and from earlier systems such as Dania. The consonants are primarily mono-phonemic symbols. Fine nuances in articulation can be distinguished by

diacritics A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

(e.g. dots or tildes beneath or across the character). Vowels are distinguished with a more extensive system of diacritics. To describe the various dialectal sounds of the German letter "e", for example, the system uses the letter "e" with

tréma Diacritical marks of two dots , placed side-by-side over or under a letter, are used in several languages for several different purposes. The most familiar to English-language speakers are the diaeresis and the umlaut, though there are numerou ...

s, upstrokes,

tildes The tilde (, also ) is a grapheme or with a number of uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish , which in turn came from the Latin , meaning 'title' or 'superscription'. Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in c ...

and hooks below, separately and in combination. It is possible to write more than 500 different variants of the letter "e". There are a number of Teuthonista systems that use different base letters and diacritics, and the characters they have in common do not have defined values between systems. In Reichel (2003), the basic vowel letters are a e i o u. Vowels are stacked for an intermediate articulation (near-low vowels aͤ and aͦ, high-mid vowels iͤ and oͧ, central vowels uͥ and oͤ). Reduced vowels are ɪ ʊ ə α. Lenis and fortis consonants are paired: b p, d t, k g. For fricatives they are: As in the IPA and

extIPA The Extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for Disordered Speech, commonly abbreviated extIPA , are a set of letters and diacritics devised by the International Clinical Phonetics and Linguistics Association to augment the Internati ...

, diacritics may doubled for greater degree and placed in parentheses for a lesser degree. For example, ẹ, e᪷ are a close (high) and open (low) e, while e̤, e᪸ are a closer (higher) and more open (lower) e,With the vowel letters e i o u, the under-dot and hook below mean the vowel is raised or lowered, but with 'a' it means the vowel is fronted or backed. These are similar to the IPA half rings diacritics for raising and lowering used until 1989. Unicode supplies separate code points single and double open marks just for Teuthonista transcription as they look more like hook or small iota than IPA’s left half ring. and ẹ᪽, e᪷᪽ are only slightly raised and lowered e. Similarly, ë and ẽ are rounded and nasalized e, while ë̈, ẽ̃ are extra-rounded and extra-nasalized e and ë᪻, ẽ᪻ are slightly rounded and nasalized e. Parentheses around a double diacritic, such as ë̈᪻, mean the degree of modification is intermediate between that indicated by a single and a double diacritic. An example of the shades of sound indicated by diacritics is the following scale from near-high to near-low front vowels: :

Usage

The Teuthonista phonetic transcription system is used by the following projects:

Lexicons

* Badisches Wörterbuch * Bayerisches Wörterbuch * Wörterbuch der bairischen Mundarten in Österreich

Linguistic atlases

* Sprachatlas der deutschen Schweiz * Südwestdeutscher Sprachatlas * Atlas der historischen deutschen Mundarten auf dem Gebiet der Tschechischen Republik * Sprachatlas von Oberösterreich * Vorarlberger Sprachatlas * Teilprojekte des Bayerischen Sprachatlas ** Sprachatlas von Bayerisch-Schwaben ** Sprachatlas von Mittelfranken ** Sprachatlas von Unterfranken ** Sprachatlas von Niederbayern ** Sprachatlas von Nordostbayern ** Sprachatlas von Oberbayern

Notes

References

External links

* * {{in lang, de
Teuthonista transcription symbols at ''Vivaio Acustico delle Lingue e dei Dialetti d’Italia''
Humboldt University, Berlin. Phonetic alphabets German phonology Writing systems introduced in the 1920s 1920s in science