Musa for English
The Home page discussed some of the problems with our current spelling :
-
The Roman alphabet doesn't have enough letters for English, especially vowels.
Many sounds are written multiple ways, and many spellings spell multiple sounds.
That makes it harder for English speakers to learn how to read and write, about three years harder than it could be.
Many letters are used differently from other languages, making it harder to learn them and harder for their speakers to learn English.
Since we need 52 letters (upper- and lower-case) plus numerals and punctuation, it's hard to fit a good English keyboard on a small phone.
There's no good way to write stress or intonation, which are big parts of English.
And there's no rhyme or reason to our system : it's just a hodge-podge of historical quick fixes.
The Musa script solves all of those problems. For example, the shapes of the letters indicate their pronunciation : vowels are small, and consonants are twice as tall. Rounded vowels are round, and unrounded vowels are unround. Closed vowels are closed, and open vowels are open. Consonants with sharp tops are sharp sounds, while consonants with smooth tops are smooth sounds, and so on.
You'll notice many more regularities as you learn Musa. Of course, you don't have to think about them as you read Musa! You'll just learn the letters, as you did with the Roman alphabet when you learned to read English. And Musa doesn't have capital letters, so there are fewer letters even though they represent more sounds.
But the fact that the letter shapes form a system is a big advantage, both for learning English and in case you spot an unfamiliar letter in a foreign language. Since Musa is a universal script, it has letters for all the sounds we don't have in English, too! But you don't need to learn all those letters - just the ones for the languages you want to read and write.
Legend
Before we really start, take a look at this legend. It has all the information you need to write English in Musa. The center line shows the 22 Musa shapes, but we only use 18 of them in English. We use 15 of them for vowels, 10 of them as the tops of consonants, and 10 of them as the bottoms of consonants.
For example, the sound of p at the beginning of the word pea has the Wi top at upper left, and the Ti bottom in the yellow section: . The vowel in pea is the Ni shape in the cyan section followed by the y offglide spelled with Yu and Ni: . So pea is spelled .
Consonants
Here are the English consonants, along with examples of their use. Note that the top four rows all seem to feature the same stop consonants: p/b t/d ts/dz ch/j k/g - we'll discuss them below.
| peas appear | tease attack | tsar tsunami | cheese achieve | keys accuse |
| sip | sit | sick | ||
| bob spill compass | dad still mental | beats | just denture | gig skill conquer |
| above | adopt | beads | ajar edge | against |
| fluff | thirtieth | sauce | sheepish | |
| valve | they | zoos | Asia | |
| mom | nun | banking | ||
| we | low | roar² | you | all¹ |
| night-owl | metal, medal | oar² | high | uh-oh |
¹You may never have thought about it before, but we English speakers pronounce l differently at the end of syllables, as in the difference between let and tell. When the l comes between vowels, you have to recognize which syllable it belongs to, as in the difference between alive and allied. In Musa, we use a different letter for this "dark" final ll.
²English dialects are divided into two large groups, and (among other features) they pronounce the r sound after vowels quite differently. Most of the American dialects (USA and Canada) are rhotic: they pronounce r after a vowel with the same sound they use before a vowel, the retroflex semivowel ɹ as in roar above. Most of the Island dialects (Great Britain, Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, Caribbean, Singapore, South Africa) are non-rhotic: an r after a vowel is pronounced with a centering offglide towards schwa, or sometimes by simply lengthening the vowel. We'll talk more about this under diphthongs, below.
Allophonic Spelling
Anybody can hear that car is pronounced differently in York and New York, and many other features of English are equally easy to hear, like its unusual system of fortis-lenis opposition or its vowel reduction. We'll call those features allophonic.
But there are many other features of English that require some training to hear, or at least someone has to point them out to you. Pre-fortis clipping (see below) is a good example: if you don't do it correctly, you might not sound like a native, but most natives would be surprised to be told they're doing it at all. We'll call those features orthophonic.
When we write English in Musa for a general readership, we spell out the allophonic features, but not the orthophonic. Many orthophonic features are also only used in certain regions or certain registers: they're dialectal. On this page, I'll mark the orthophonic features with a ⚠ caution symbol to indicate that you shouldn't take them into account when spelling English unless you're spelling out your own dialect.
Fortis and Lenis Consonants
Musa spells English at a more phonetic level than we now do, so you have to be a little more aware of how we actually pronounce our language. Fortunately, there are only a couple of tricky parts to learn. You'll encounter reduced vowels below; the other has to do with the voicing of stop consonants.
The English plosives p t k and the affricate ch are fortis: they contrast with the corresponding lenis consonants b d g j. This phonemic distinction controls the voicing of the phonetic forms, but in a somewhat indirect manner. Fortis stops are usually aspirated and never voiced, and lenis stops are sometimes voiced and never aspirated, but both of them are sometimes unvoiced.
Fortis stops p t k ch keep their aspiration at the beginning of a word or the beginning of a stressed syllable, and we write them with aspirated letters:
| | | | |
|---|---|---|---|
| pin | tin | kin | chin |
| | | | |
| repair | return | recover | recharge |
These fortis stops lose their aspiration in three situations. First, when they follow an unvoiced fricative f th s sh, even when the fricative is in the preceding syllable (most of the time, but there are cases like passport where the two syllables act like two different words).
| | | | |
|---|---|---|---|
| spill | still | skill | |
| | | | |
| disperse | disturb | discuss | discharge |
Second, at the beginning of an unstressed syllable:
| | | | |
|---|---|---|---|
| compass | mental | balcony | denture |
Third, at the end of a syllable. When speaking carefully, emphasizing, or contrasting, final fortis stops keep their aspiration:
| | | | |
|---|---|---|---|
| bat | bite | built | bent |
For example, we might aspirate those words when contrasting them with bad bide build bend, or when they're followed by a vowel.
But most of the time, in connected speech, the stop becomes applosive (held unreleased) and the preceding vowel is often clipped or devoiced (see below). That's why hat doesn't sound like had, even though the d is devoiced. An applosive stop may also close the glottis (so the air pressure behind the stop doesn't build up and need release), but not all the time. We write held stops with letters with a "lazy" open wedge :
| | | | |
|---|---|---|---|
| bat | bite | built | bent |
Here are the letters for applosive p and k:
| | | | |
|---|---|---|---|
| rap | rat | rack |
If there's an offglide before the final fortis stop, the stop is still held:
| | | | |
|---|---|---|---|
| spite | spout | sport |
If there's an l, a nasal, or another plosive before the final fortis stop, it's more likely to stay aspirated. But the first plosive is applosive.
| | |
|---|---|
| apt | act |
However, if there's a fricative before the final fortis stop, the stop becomes tenuis, just like it does at the beginning of a syllable:
| | | | |
|---|---|---|---|
| clasp | cast | cask | |
| | | | |
| lift | toothed | pushed |
Affricates at the end of the syllable are written as if they were an applosive stop followed by a fricative release. But if they're written with a single letter (those with homorganic sibilants), the top is tenuis - the affricate is released!
| | | | |
|---|---|---|---|
| caps | cats | tax | catch |
Fortis means "strong", and the opposite is lēnis, which means "weak". Lenis stops b d g j don't have their own voice: they adopt the voice of the surrounding sounds. So they're voiced around vowels and voiced consonants, and we write them with voiced letters:
| | | | |
|---|---|---|---|
| robber | fodder | logger | roger |
| | | | |
| suburban | bandleader | congregate | enlargement |
But if they're next to a pause or an unvoiced consonant (p t c ch k q f th s sh h) - before or after - they're unvoiced. The voicing may begin before the release, or end after the closure - in other words, they may be partially voiced - but we write them with unvoiced letters to show that the voicing is interrupted.
| | | | |
|---|---|---|---|
| bib | dead | gag | judge |
| | | | |
| misbehave | misdial | misguide | misjudge |
| | | | |
| hubcap | dreadful | bagpipe | hedgehog |
Affricates at the end of the syllable act like fricatives, so the final dge's above are written with voiced letters.
When a syllable ends with another consonant before the lenis stop, even a voiced one, the final stop is still tenuis. This seems like a rare example of the absence of assimilation by voice in a cluster, but in fact that final "unvoiced" stop is actually initially voiced - the voicing just stops before the release, so we write it with an unvoiced letter.
| | | | |
|---|---|---|---|
| build | bend | robbed | rigged |
| | | | |
| moved | bathed | raised | aged |
When a final lenis stop is followed by an s, as in plurals (dogs), possessives (dog's), contractions (Doug's gone), and 3rd person present verbs (digs), we pronounce the s as a voiced z so that the stop stays voiced.
| | | | |
|---|---|---|---|
| labs | birds | bugs | badges |
| | | | |
| absorbs | birdseye | hogshead |
As you can see, there are contexts in which we write the fortis and lenis sounds with the same Musa letter, and in fact they sound alike: disburse versus disperse, Huntingdon versus Huntington, disgust versus discussed. If it's not a problem when spoken aloud, it's not a problem in writing.
Lenis final stops may also be applosive when speaking quickly. In that case, write them with the same applosive letters: they sound alike (except for the pre-fortis clipping - see below).
| | |
|---|---|
| hat | had |
Fricatives f th s sh are also fortis (th as in thigh), and contrast with lenis v dh z zh (dh as in that, zh as in measure garage), but they're much less complicated: the fortis fricatives are always unvoiced, and the lenis fricatives almost always voiced. When there's a cluster of consonants at the beginning or end of a syllable, they usually share their voicing. That's why we pronounce cats with an s, and dogs with a z.
⚠ Pre-Fortis Clipping
Above, I mentioned that English distinguishes fortis from lenis final stops by not releasing the fortis ones, but there's another distinction: final fortis sounds clip (shorten) the previous vowel. There's some variation (and some debate) as to the exact circumstances, but a typical rule is that stressed vowels are clipped before a fortis final: plosive, affricate, or fricative. Unstressed vowels followed by a sonorant (y w r l m n ng) - are also often clipped, and any sonorants between the vowel and the final are clipped as part of the vowel, but only fortis consonants within the same syllable matter: we clip teak but not teacup.
In Musa, we write that clipping above or below the vowel as a falling accent, even if what's actually shortened is a following sonorant.
| | |
|---|---|
| hat | had |
| | |
| writing | riding |
| | |
| petal | pedal |
| | |
| airport | keyboard |
| | |
| institute | altitude |
| | |
| wicket | wicked |
The final vowel of institute is clipped, because it's long enough, but the middle vowel of institute and the final vowel of wicket aren't. But they may become unvoiced, and we write that with the same accent.
Flapping
In American dialects, when a t or d comes before a reduced vowel, it's actually pronounced as a flap, which we spell . For example, words like water and bottle are said to sound like wodder and boddle, but the flap doesn't sound like a d, either: it sounds like a Spanish r. Both t and d are flapped in those contexts, so latter is pronounced like ladder and petal is pronounced like pedal (except for the pre-fortis clipping). The suffix -ing counts as reduced, even though the i is not reduced, so writing is pronounced like riding. An r before the t or d doesn't prevent flapping, but the subsequent vowel must follow directly.
Flapping is kind of a "consonant reduction" that accompanies vowel reduction (see below).
Affricates
English often adds an s to the ends of words: plurals like cats, possessives like cat's, the 3rd person singular present of most verbs, like puts, and contractions with is or has, like it's. If the word ends in t, we combine it with the s and replace them both with the letter ts . Likewise, d plus s (actually, z) becomes dz , as in reads rides roads. But we don't combine them across a morpheme boundary, as in wetsuit nutshell windstorm headshot.
As I mentioned above, we write homorganic sibilant affricates with a single letter: tenuis for fortis affricates, and voiced for lenis affricates. All other affricates are written as digraphs with an applosive stop. We also use digraphs when the initial plosive is released before the sibilant, so we can write the difference between ratchet and ratshit .
Fonts with ligatures often offer ligatures for many other affricates, not just those with s and z. For example, they may write pf as . Those ligatures are written with tenuis tops, since they're single letters.
Other Changes in Consonants
There are a lot more phonological phenomena in English - too many to cover them all here. We'll discuss some of them below. Of the rest, most of them appear in only some dialects, but that's not a reason to ignore them! We want written English to reflect all the diversity of spoken English - we don't want Scots and Texans to sound like the Queen in writing. Here are a few:
When t d s z are followed by y, they combine to form ch j sh zh, a phenomenon called yod-coalescence. It's as if the word mature were spelled machure, module were spelled modjule, sure were spelled shure, and Asia were spelled Azha. Likewise, when t or d is followed by r, they often become affricates, as if they were spelled chr and djr, and we write them that way in Musa .
Many English speakers pronounce h before the yu diphthong as a palatal fricative in words like hue huge human humor humid humility.
In many dialects, tense vowels insert a schwa before l, so that words like peel pool pale pole are pronounced pee-ᵻl poo-ᵻl pay-ᵻl poe-ᵻl. This is called vowel breaking. For example, bowl would be written .
⚠ When l r w y follow an aspirated plosive, they lose their voice (because the delayed voice of the aspirate continues through the following medial sonorant). To write this in Musa, just use the letters for voiceless l̥ r̥ w̥ y̥.
| | | | |
|---|---|---|---|
| clue | crude | quote | cue |
⚠ More and more frequently, a held fortis consonant at the end of a word before a following word that starts with a vowel is pronounced as an ejective:
| | | |
|---|---|---|
| steep angle | flat angle | thick angle |
⚠ In some dialects, words in wh-, like whine and whale are pronounced unlike wine and wail - the wh is voiceless. Musa has a letter for that sound: .
⚠ In some dialects, syllable-final fortis stops before an unstressed vowel or end of word are replaced or augmented with a glottal stop: water might be [ˈwɔːʔə] , and what might be [wɒˀt] , using the Glottal suffix as a prefix. It's very common to replace fortis t with a glottal stop when it's followed by a reduced "syllabic" sonorant (written in Musa with the vowel), as in button, and sometimes also bottom or bottle.
There's much more to be said, but not by me. For more information on the details of British English, I recommend the books and videos of Geoff Lindsey. As I mention above, the idea is to write English in Musa to a standard, but a more local standard than we do now. That makes it slightly harder to understand - just as a Jamaican, an Indian, or a Kiwi are hard for me to understand in speech - but ultimately means that everybody writes the language they speak.
Orthophonic Transcription
All of the phonology above is reflected in how we write English in Musa - that's called allophonic transcription. But there are situations in which we want to show even more detail, which is called orthophonic transcription. One such situation is very common: people learning English (not just learning how to write English when they already speak it). Those foreign learners need to see the details of pronunciation, since they don't have all the phonology in their subconscious like we native speakers do. Another situation that calls for orthophonic transcription is in linguistics, when we might want to describe precisely how an individual or a dialect pronounces a word. A third situation is when a dialect pronounces a sound in a noteworthy manner.
I'll give you an example: the English r sound. We'll talk below about rhotic versus non-rhotic accents, but that distinction only affects how r is pronounced after a vowel, as an offglide. There's quite a bit of variety in how r is pronounced before a vowel, too. The Wikipedia article on this topic lists eight pronunciations, shown here in Musa and in IPA:
| | | | | | | | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ɹ̠ʷ | ɣ̞ʷˤ | ɹˠ | ɻʷ | ʋ | ɾ | r | ʁ |
The first five are all approximants, and they cover the vast majority of pronunciations. We usually write them all as , the rhotic semivowel, and we don't bother about the subtle differences in pronunciation. But if you do want to indicate one of the above - if you're describing how Sean Connery said "From Russia with Love" (with the sixth one above, the flap) - then Musa has the letters. That's a good example of the use of orthophonic transcription in ordinary English: to indicate a Scottish accent.
Vowels
The English vowels differ quite a bit between dialects. We'll start by describing a general system that applies to most dialects, and then describe some of the particular differences.
A note for speakers outside of North America: the textbook British accent is called RP, for Received Pronunciation. That's what Queen Victoria spoke! But nowadays, the standard British accent has evolved somewhat, both with the passage of time and with the passage of prestige from the upper class to the middle class. What you are more likely to hear these days is something called Estuary English, SSB (Standard Southern British), or CUBE (Current British English). There are numerous resources available to explore the newer pronunciations, but here's a good one: the CUBE Dictionary.
Short Vowels
Here are the English short vowels :
| | itchy | | cookie | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| | elbow | | ugly | | office |
| | apple | | octave | | olive |
Long Vowels
In most Island dialects, and are actually long vowels, written in Musa with a long mark:
| | almond | | author |
|---|
When these long vowels are followed by another vowel, as in clawing, they use a Break as separator.
So Island dialects have a short in words like lot and cloth, a long in words like palm, and a long in words like thought. Meanwhile, American dialects pronounce words like lot the same as palm, but short, and words like cloth are pronounced the same as thought, but short. Notwithstanding, the original palm words are still long: almond calm spa father pa Shah mafia lager. And the original thought words are still long, too: author caught sauce cause hawk paw walk all water broad salt.
| Island | Lexical Set | American |
|---|---|---|
| | trap, bad, cab, ham, arrow | |
| | bath, staff, clasp, dance | |
| palm, calm, bra, father | | |
| | lot, stop, rob, swan | |
| cloth, cough, long, laurel, origin | | |
| | thought, taut, hawk, broad | |
To make things worse, in many American dialects, the office and author vowels in the lower right cells are actually pronounced as . In these pages, we'll write that cloth/thought vowel as , but you can write it as you pronounce it. In diphthongs like oyster or order, it's always pronounced and written as .
Diphthongs
Diphthongs are vowels that move while you're saying them, from one vowel position to another. One vowel is more prominent, and we write the other one as a semivowel, a vowel being used as a consonant. When the semivowel comes before the vowel, we call it an onglide and a rising diphthong; when it comes after the vowel, we call it an offglide and a falling diphthong. Sometimes the two positions are far apart (a wide diphthong), and sometimes the positions are close together (a narrow diphthong), or even the same - it still behaves like a diphthong. English has both closing diphthongs that end in the y or w sounds, and centering diphthongs that end in r.
Four diphthongs move toward the close front vowel :
| | eagle |
|---|---|
| | acorn |
| | eyeball |
| | oyster |
Four move toward the close back vowel :
| | ooze |
|---|---|
| | ocean |
| | owl |
| | use |
The use diphthong above has both a y onglide and a w offglide, as in unit, beauty, few and mute. It's the same as the ooze diphthong, except there's an onglide y in front of it:
| | fool |
|---|---|
| | fuel |
| | Yule |
There are six more diphthongs that move inward toward the rhotic vowel :
| | early | | earring | | arrow | | army | | order | | tourist |
|---|
Note that the vowels of the rhotic diphthongs are lax or central, while the vowels of the closing diphthongs were tense.
In non-rhotic dialects this offglide moves toward the schwa vowel . We spell this with an centering offglide:
| | burr | | beer | | bear | | bar | | bore | | boor |
|---|
In modern Standard Southern British, the offglide has become a simple lengthening of the vowel, so the sounds above are now pronounced as spelled here, with a long mark:
| | burr | | beer | | bear | | bar | | bore | | boor |
|---|
However, when the r is pronounced between vowels ("linking" r, as in four aces) or an epenthetic r is inserted ("intrusive" r, as in draw(r)ing), then the offglide should change to .
There are also three triphthongs ending in r - pyre, power and pure. Some dialects consider hire, flour and your to be one syllable, while others split them in two like higher, flower and ewer.
| | hire | | higher |
|---|---|---|---|
| | flour | | flower |
| | your | | ewer |
Reduced Vowels
In English, the rhythm of a word - which syllables are stressed and which aren't - is very important. In Musa, stressed vowels are written high - in the top half of the line - and unstressed vowels are written low - in the bottom half of the line.
Many unstressed syllables - including many one-syllable "little words" - feature reduced vowels. A reduced vowel is a lazier version of its unreduced version, and it usually indicates that the syllable is less interesting: it's carrying less information. Because of this semantic aspect, one can't predict vowel reduction based just on the sounds. Before we give you some examples, let's talk about what vowel reduction is, phonetically.
Musa has two letters that are only used for reduced vowels in English:
| schwi | button | | roses |
|---|---|---|---|
| mid schwa | bottle | | easels |
| open schwa | bottom | | Rosa's |
The third vowel above is the same letter as the ugly short vowel. It's also a very common reduced vowel. I mention it here because in some dialects, it sounds a little different when used as a stressed vowel, as in strut, from how it sounds when used as a reduced vowel, as in comma (IPA ʌ versus ɐ). Even when they sound a little different, there's no ambiguity: the high (stressed) letter always spells strut ʌ, and the low (unstressed) letter always spells comma ɐ.
So here's how vowel reduction works: the close short vowels all reduce to , which sounds like the short i sound of itchy except that your lips aren't spread. It also sounds like the short u sound of cookie except that your lips aren't rounded. This sound is called schwi; it's the most common vowel in English. You can hear it in words like is, it, its, if, his, in, message, rabbit, and button. It sometimes sounds like there's no vowel there at all. Some dictionaries don't distinguish the close schwi from an unstressed short i as in bit, but they're different, as you can hear in word pairs like bassist versus basest. When you hesitate as to whether the sound is an i or a u, as in London, that's a schwi. Another giveaway is when your lips are not spread: if they're relaxed, it's a schwi.
The open short vowels all reduce to , which as mentioned above sounds either just like the ugly vowel or very close to it. I'll call this sound open schwa. You can hear it in words like a, the, of, bottom, about, and above. And you can hear the distinction between open schwa and schwi in the phrase Rosa's roses.
There are a couple of small points to make. Sometimes - when speaking very quickly - the open schwa reduces again to schwi, just like its ugly stressed twin. I'll call this double reduction. A word like reliable sounds fine with an open schwa for the a, but it also sounds correct with a schwi there.
Second, in some dialects, for example in most of Canada and the western USA, these two reduced vowels have merged completely, and people pronounce them with a sound that's between schwi and open schwa. We write that sound in Musa as the mid schwa . In all dialects, this mid schwa is used before a dark l: we write bottle as . But if you pronounce pigeon and Lennon differently from pidgin and Lenin, then your dialect uses both the open schwa and the schwi.
Diphthongs can also be reduced when unstressed, for example at the end of words like happy, caraway, nephew, shadow, and butter. In cases like those above, the reduction is spelled by omitting the offglide: they're truncated. For wider diphthongs, as in words like discount or nitrite, the reduction is hard to hear, and Musa doesn't write it. The rhotic diphthongs all reduce to er.
Not every unstressed vowel is reduced. As I mentioned above, whether an unstressed vowel is reduced also depends on the information content of the syllable, so the dictionary has to show reduction. When an unstressed vowel is not reduced, it's called secondary stress, and I'll refer to secondary vowels. For example, the unstressed vowels before st in historic, vestigial, plasticity, nostalgia, and crustacean are not reduced. There are no simple rules, but often, English doesn't like too many reduced vowels in sequence, and leaves one unreduced. In words like obligatory or verification, it sounds like two syllables are stressed, but one stress is stronger - the other is only secondary. In some cases, an unstressed vowel is never reduced; in others, it depends on how quickly or carefully you're speaking. Suffixes that start with a vowel - -er -est -ic -ish -id -ive -ing -ist -ism -ity - are often unreduced, but there are exceptions, like positive negative native motive, where the final syllable is reduced and the t is flapped. The suffix -ing almost never reduces to schwi.
Some examples of reduced diphthongs: the early vowel is reduced in desert but not in expert, in prosper but not larkspur, in pertain but not flirtatious. Shadow meadow arrow all reduce, but backhoe furlough don't. The word angry is reduced, but pedigree isn't; policies is reduced, but indices isn't; spiky is reduced, but psyche isn't; pantry is reduced, but pinetree isn't. Bootee and junkie are unreduced, but booty and junky are reduced. Note that in all these last cases, we don't reduce the word ending in y, a very common ending, since that syllable doesn't add much information. The syllables in ee are more unexpected.
As I mentioned above, there's a close relationship between vowel reduction and flapping of t and d: flapping only and always occurs before reduced vowels (in the absence of other consonants except r). The last syllable of photo is reduced, and the t is flapped; the last syllable of photon is unreduced, and the t is unflapped.
Changing Diphthongs
In a few situations, diphthongs change their sound … and spelling.
When a diphthong is followed by a dark l, as in keel kale cool coal curl Carl, it "breaks": a schwa is inserted in between, as if they were keyəl kayəl coowəl cowəl curəl Carəl. This is a real mid schwa [ə], not the open schwa [ɐ] used in most dialects with two weak vowels, and we spell it with Musa .
⚠ In some dialects, notably in Canada but also in much of the USA, the diphthongs [aj] as in PRICE and [aw] as in MOUTH begin at a less open point when they occur before fortis consonants p t ch k f th s sh. This is called "Canadian raising", and Yanks make fun of Hosers for saying hoass and aboat for house and about, but it's not restricted to Canada. In those dialects, price has [ɐj] while prize is still [aj], and clout has [ɐw] while cloud is still [aw]. There are also dialects which raise [aj] but not [aw] - that's called "American raising". In Musa, we spell that raising with the letter, so becomes , and becomes .
| | eyeball |
|---|---|
| | owl |
Other Changes in Vowels
⚠ Usually, reduced vowels are devoiced between two voiceless consonants, whether the consonants are fortis or devoiced lenis. But we regard this as a "performance" effect, an unintended by-product of the short time between two bouts of voicelessness. So we don't bother writing it - it's never phonemic.
⚠ In many American dialects, the short a of trap is pronounced longer and tenser (closer) before nasal consonants m n ng, as in tramp, and sometimes even before g. The resulting sound is often a diphthong, which we'll write it as εə̯ before nasals, but only when stressed.
⚠ Some dialects also differentiate between the vowels of north and forth, between hurry and furry, or between marry, merry and Mary. Musa can write all of those variants, so you can write them as you pronounce them - a modicum of variation doesn't reduce comprehension.
Contractions
The English word a is pronounced and written an when the following word starts with a vowel: a pear, but an apple. The word the also changes its pronunciation - from thə pear to thē apple - with no change in spelling. In Musa, we spell both changes:
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Unstressed is/are have/has/had will/would often combine with a preceding pronoun as in I'm you've he'll, and unstressed not often combines with a preceding auxiliary verb as in don't won't can't to form contractions. Musa separates the two words with a space, even if one or both of the words changes its form:
| I'm | | you're | | he's | |
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| I'll | | you've | | he'd | |
| don't | | doesn't | | can't | |
Note that the apostrophe in the current English spelling doesn't go between the two words; it goes where the letters have been removed, so it's not a good guide: we respell won't as wo nt.
The English possessive case is also written with an apostrophe, but it's not a contraction. In Musa, we don't write that apostrophe: the possessive the boy's bike is written just like the plural the boys bike: . But the possessive is not written the same as the contraction:
| John's home (possessive: the home of John) | |
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| John's home (contraction: John is home) | |
Likewise, the words its - the possessive of it - and the word it's - the contraction of it is or it has - are spelled differently, just as they are now in English:
| its (possessive: its home = the home of it) | |
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| it's (contraction: it's home = it is home) | |
English also has "reduced contractions" like wanna gonna gotta woulda coulda shoulda, that sometimes even coexist with normal contractions like could've. But we consider these reduced contractions to be complete words on their own, and we write them as a single word.
Vowel Summary
| green | silver | golden | wooden | blue |
| gray | red | model | office | rose |
| mustard, mocha | almond | auburn | ||
| white | black | octave | olive | brown |
| turquoise | beer | purple | gourd | fuchsia |
| fire | pear | scarlet | orange | flour |
Conversion Chart
Here's how to transcribe each of the Roman letters in Musa, for American English :
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Musa spells English at a more phonetic level than we now do, so you might want to read aloud at first. The advantages are that it's much easier to learn, that foreigners will pronounce English more correctly, and that you'll pronounce their languages more correctly as you read them in Musa.
Intonation
Musa also has symbols to spell English intonation, the "music" of spoken English. Intonation plays an important role in communicating which information is new or surprising, and how the speaker feels about it (or thinks the listener will feel about it). The Musa spelling for English intonation is presented on the Intonation page.
Transcriber
The transcriber is a tool for converting English from the Roman Alphabet to Musa:
Learning Aids
To help you learn how to read and write English in the Musa alphabet, we offer a variety of learning aids. Use the one(s) you find most useful!
Samples
Now that you've learned how it works, why don't you try reading some sentences?
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| The road to Hell is paved with good intentions |
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| No good deed goes unpunished |
And here's a limerick:
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And a couple of famous quotes.
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Finally, a complete poem:
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