International Latin Alphabet

Part of the Unified Alphabet System.

System	Symbols																												Comment
IPA	a	b	ʃ	d	e	f	g	h	i	j	k	l	m	n	o	p	ʒ	r	s	t	u	v	w	x	y	z	ç	q
UAS-diacritic	^				´				.						˚						ˇ				`
Unified Latin Alphabet 1994	a	b	q	d	e	f	g	h	i	j	k	l	m	n	o	p	y	r	s	t	u	v	w	x	-	z	c	-
Unified Latin Alphabet 2015	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h	i	j	k	l	m	n	o	p	y	r	s	t	u	v	w	x	-	z	q	-
Unified Latin Alphabet 2016	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h	i	j	k	l	m	n	o	p	q	r	s	t	u	v	w	x	y	z	-	-
Unified Latin Alphabet 2017?	a	b	c	d	e	f	g	h	i	j	k	l	m	n	o	p	q	r	s	t	u	v	w	x	ə	z	-	-

Design principles of the target alphabet

Create a phonetic alphabet (ordered set of assignments of phones to graphemes) where

1. each letter is from the Lowercase Latin alphabet as defined in "C0 Controls and Basic Latin" (http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0000.pdf)
2. each letter represents a phone that is represented by one character in IPA (https://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/sites/default/files/IPA_Kiel_2015.pdf)
3. each letter that represents a vowel in IPA should represent a vowel in the target alphabet, same for consonants
4. each phone that is represented in the target alphabet and in IPA is represented by a letter that is part of the target alphabet, should be represented by that letter in the target alphabet

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Two constraints, a replacement value (for IPA) must be

• represented by a grapheme that is not a single Basic Latin letter (= a phone that is represented by a Basic Latin letter in IPA should only be assigned to the same letter in the alphabet)
• from the same of the two classes consonant and vowel, as the replaced value

Process to obtain the target alphabet

Select the letters of the Lowercase Latin alphabet in the order as listed in "C0 Controls and Basic Latin"

<a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z>

and assign to each the phonetic value represented by the same letter in IPA, if any

[a b c d e f - h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z]

Change assignments to increase coverage of spoken conversation.

1. Consonants

1.1 <g> : assign the phonetic value represented in IPA by "LATIN SMALL LETTER SCRIPT G" (U+0261) http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0250.pdf

• Reason: visually similar

• Symmetry: voiceless counterpart(?) of [k]

• Occurrence of initial phone: N.A., "LATIN SMALL LETTER G" is not part of IPA

• Occurrence of replacement phone: found in English, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, varieties of Arabic and varieties of Chinese, symmetry: voiceless counterpart of <k>

• Precedence: common assignment

1.2 <c> : replace [c] with [ʃ] and include as allophones [ʂ], [ɕ]

• Reason: [ʃ] found more often than [c]

• Occurrence of initial phone: not present in a standard variety of any of the six official UN languages

• Occurrence of replacement phone: Arabic, English, French, varieties of Spanish

[ʂ] in Russian

• Precedence:

- found in IPA pre-1900 - Northern Berber Latin alphabet - conlangs: Esperanto 1894, Uropi 1986, Loglan 1986, Lojban 1997, Sambahsa Phonetic Transcription <year?>, Tceqli 2017, Pandunia 2017.

• Other:

- <c> or <ci> represent /ʃ/ in some English words, e.g. <musician>. - <c> appears as single letter representing a sound containing /ʃ/, e.g. Italian <c> = /tʃ/ before <e,i>. - <c> appears in multigraphs representing a sound sequence containing a sound /ʃ/, e.g. German <sch>, Italian <sc>, French <ch>, x-Esperanto <cx>, Spanish <ch>, Czech <cz>, Hungarian <cs>. - <c> with diacritics represents a sound sequence containing a sound /ʃ/, e.g. Esperanto <ĉ>, Czech <č>, Maltese <ċ>, Turkish <ç> - The IPA /ɕ/ may sound as an allophone of /ʃ/ for some.

1.3  : replace [q] with [ʒ] and include as allophones [ʐ], [ʑ]

• Reason: [ʒ] and nearby values [ʐ], [ʑ] found more often than [q]

• Occurrence of initial phone: not present in a standard variety of any of the six official UN languages

• Occurrence of replacement phone: English, French, varieties of Spanish, varieties of Arabic,

[ʐ] in Chinese, Russian

• Precedence: No precedence known.

2. Vowels 2.1 <a> : change from front [a] to central [ä], include old value as allophone

• Reason: symmetry, actual use?
• Precedence: (...)

2.2 <e o> : change from close-mid [e o] to mid [e̞ o̞], include old value as allophone

• Reason: symmetry reasons one may like to change the values to mid

• Occurrence of initial phone: not present in a standard variety of any of the six official UN languages

• Occurrence of replacement phone:

• Precedence: (...)
• Other:

there might be reasons in observed use of spoken conversation for not changing them.

2.3 <y> : replace [y] with central-mid [ə] or declare [ə] as allophone

• Reason: symmetry
• Precedence: (...)

Affricate relevance

• interslav: "bogatši" which means "richer". t and š need to be pronounced separately, otherwise it would be written "bogači", which is a different word and is the singular locative of "bogač", which means "rich man" - ULA would have /bogatci/ for both and cannot distinguish.
• Polish
  • tc : <cz> VS <trz>
    • <czy> VS <trzy>
      • workaround: <tc> VS <tq>, the latter with progressive voicing assimilation
  • dq : <dż> VS <drz>
    • <dżem> = "jam", with monophonemic affricate, versus <drzem> = "take a nap (imperative)" with plosive-plus-fricative sequence.
      • workaround: <dq> VS <dc>, the latter with progressive voicing assimilation