Italian is pretty close to Latin, so the Roman alphabet should suit Italian well. But there are a few odd points:

• Italian has seven vowels, but Roman has only 5 vowel letters. The shortfall is made up with rules and diacritics.
• The Roman alphabet is also missing letters for postalveolar sh ch dj and palatal ny ly.
• The letters s z are ambiguous for voice - they spell both s ts and z dz.
• The letters c g represent different sounds in different contexts, and sometimes need to be followed by silent h or i.
• The letter h is silent, but not absent.

Musa solves all these problems.

Consonants

Here are the consonants of Italian, with the current orthography in black and IPA in green:

 p p	 t t	 z ʦ	 c(i) ʧ	 c(h) k
 b b	 d d	 z ʣ	 g(i) ʤ	 g(h) g
 f f		 s s	 sc(i) ʃ
 v v		 s z
 m m	 n n		 gn ɲ	 n(k/g) ŋ
	 l l	 r r	 gl λ
			 i j	 u w

Geminate plosives and affricates are written with a held (unreleased) first consonant, for example as  grazie or  va bene. Geminate fricatives are just doubled.

Vowels

 i  i	 u u
 é e	 ó o
 è ɛ	 ò ɔ
 a a

Stress, normally on the penultimate syllable, is indicated by a high vowel. Stressed vowels in open syllables are long, and written with the Long mark, except at the end of words.  and  never occur in unstressed syllables.

Samples

Now that you know the letters, why don't you try reading a sentence?



Chi non fa, non falla