This page collects some detailed explanations and an assortment of useful resources for people who already understand how Musa works, but are just now trying to use it to spell pronunciation with the same level of precision as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA).
But the goal of using Musa to spell pronunciation is not just to provide the same or better coverage as the IPA and similar scripts, it's also to offer an orthography that's so easy to learn, easy to use, and clear that we use it everywhere: in dictionaries and encyclopedias, in tourist guides, in language textbooks, and everywhere that we need to spell pronunciation.
Among the resources on the website, you can find a page of charts showing the correspondences between IPA and Musa, a transcriber with which you can convert IPA (or X-SAMPA or Kirshenbaum) to Musa, and an IPA/Musa typewriter.
We also offer several fonts that transliterate between Musa and the IPA. To use them, all you need to do is highlight the text you want to transliterate and choose one of these fonts:
The Ripe Musa Trans font ("Ripe" stands for Roman IPA) replaces Musa letters with the corresponding IPA letters, while the Overripe Musa Ruby font puts IPA letters underneath the Musa spelling. Both of these put IPA in the Musa codepoints.
Going in the other direction, the Unripe Musa Trans font replaces IPA letters with the corresponding Musa letters, while the Underripe Musa Ruby font puts Musa letters underneath the IPA. Both of those put Musa in IPA codepoints.
Here's a sample of Overripe:
A great way to use these fonts online is to create transliteration tooltips that appear when you hover the mouse over the text. Try hovering the mouse over the following line:
Here's the CSS: #yourtext:hover {font-family: 'Ripe Musa Trans'; color: DarkGreen;}
If you need to describe the pronunciation of English vowels - a very common problem since their spelling is so crazy - then we have a great solution for you: the Pygmalion Musa Diacritic font.
Pygmalion writes small Musa vowels over the English vowels, so you know how they're pronounced by reference to a legend at the bottom of the page. Here's one for General American:
There's another font called Galatea Musa Diacritic that can put both vowels and consonants over Roman letters:
The notation above handles the first two formants and rounding, and the three vowel suffixes handle length, nasality, and rhoticity. But we still have to handle vowel quality (phonation).
For that, we use accent marks. This choice seems confusing: how can reader know whether an accent indicates a pitch tone or an unusual vowel quality? But in fact, there is no firm line between vowel quality and tone: many tones involve more than just musical pitch. And the tone spelled with the same accent may sound different in different languages, anyway.
So for languages without pitch tone, we have a standard set of interpretations for the three accent marks, both high and low:
Note that we're trying to make a fine distinction between a long vowel and a lengthened vowel, and likewise between a short vowel and a shortened or clipped vowel. When the length is part of the vowel, we use the long mark. When the lengthening is applied to a vowel which isn't inherently long, but is made longer by the context, then we use the Rising accent, and likewise for short versus clipped vowels.
When used along with vowel digraphs, we go into even more detail: both vowels bear accents. The accent on the first vowel follows the pattern above, while the accent on the second vowel specifies the exact phonation:
So for example, the Danish word for dog, hund, would be written for Danes and for phoneticians.
The notation above works pretty well for vowels, when it's only the quality of a single vowel that you want to spell. But voicings like creaky voice, harsh voice, and whisper are often used for entire words or even longer stretches of speech. For those cases, and for the many other unusual types of voice quality, Musa uses orthophonic affixes. You can read all about them on the previous page.
The IPA sure has a lot of diacritics: 31 of them, plus 7 suprasegmentals (we won't even talk about tones and intonation here). Most of them are only needed in narrow phonetic transcription, not for everyday spelling or even allophonic transcription. Musa has only 16 suffixes to cover the same scope, mostly because in many cases Musa offers single letters that incorporate the missing diacritic. In this section, we'll explain how that's done, treating each IPA diacritic in the order it appears in the IPA charts.
Here are the Musa suffixes again, along with the IPA diacritic they correspond to:
There are combinations of IPA symbol + diacritic that can't be written in Musa: an aspirated nasal nʰ, or ɝˡ a rhotic vowel with lateral release. Undoubtably, some are even useful. If you run across such a case, please let us know so we can address the lacuna.
On the previous page, I mentioned that transcriptions usually use the Dushan Musa Alphabet font, which is monospace and uses no Advanced Typography features (so it will display reliably on almost any device). In Alphabet gait, these suffixes follow the letters they modify. But you may want to use Ligature gait, in which suffixes are combined with the letters they modify into ligatures - single letters that are taller (both ascenders and descenders). All you need to do is use a ligature font, like Taunus Musa Ligature.
The use of ligatures enables us to make a distinction, when needed, between a suffix and a semivowel. For example, in Proto-Indo-European, a labialized kʷ (pronounced with rounded lips) was distinct from a k followed by semivowel w: kw. In that latter case, using a ligature font, insert a Zero-Width Non-Joiner (ZWNJ, unicode 200C) between the two letters to prevent the formation of the ligature when you want to spell the semivowel form. The ZWNJ is available on a Musa keyboard as Muna
This is as good a place as any to talk about the few consonants for which the IPA has a letter, but Musa doesn't. In some of those cases, the Musa letter stands for a range of sounds that the IPA splits, so we need a way to specify which variant we mean. For that, we use suffixes. Of course, there are also many cases when both IPA and Musa need diacritics to specify a rare sound - we won't talk about them here.
Musa uses the same letter for a velar lateral, IPA ʟ, and a velarized alveolar lateral, IPA ɫ. To differentiate them, use for the latter.
We consider that most "palatal" nasals and laterals - IPA ɲ and ʎ - are actually alveolo-palatal, and we write them with humming bottoms . The IPA doesn't have official symbols for the alveolo-palatal sounds, but ȵ and ȴ are widely-used unofficial symbols. The Musa letters can be used for either the palatal or alveolo-palatal sounds, but if you need to distinguish them, use for the palatal sounds. If needed, we can revive the palatal letters that Musa used to have.
Finally, Musa has no dedicated letter for the Swedish sj sound, written in IPA as ɧ. This phoneme has several different dialectal allophones, ranging from a velarized labiodental to a labialized velar. If you're Swedish and want to describe your pronunciation in detail, feel free to use whatever Musa spelling seems right, for example or . For the rest of us, we're going to settle on the spelling as a reasonable intermediate approximation for the sound at the beginning of a stressed syllable, and elsewhere.
The easiest way to begin using Musa is to include it alongside whenever you use IPA
You're going to need three things:
You're probably going to need a legend (as with the IPA). You can link to our IPA charts, or you can provide a legend for just the Musa letters you need showing the correspondences with the current orthography of the language you're describing (like the one above, or this one).
And that's it! You're ready to go :)
I should mention that if you need anything else: materials, utilities, clarification, even changes to Musa, that's what the Musa Academy is here for. We want to provide whatever it takes for Musa to succeed. So please don't hesitate to get in touch at musa@musa.bet.
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