Iáþi/Writing Systems

Iáþi has two native scripts, known as Se Hízôl and Se Φúteentar. Se Hízol is a true alphabet, and is the script used for daily purposes by native speakers. Se Φúteentar is a featural abugida, and is used for ceremonial and other special occasions, as well as decorations. All native speakers are taught to read and write in both scripts.

Neither of these scripts are encoded on computers, therefore systems of transliteration have been developed to enable writing of Iáþi on computers. There are three main systems of this type. The most popular system is known as the Stón system, and the others are known as the Kajdra system and the Perdis system.

The Stón System
The Stón system, the most common non-native transcription of Iáþi, is a Latin-based script appended with Greek and Cyrillic characters in order to maintain a one-to-one phoneme-to-glyph ratio. This is the system used on all Iáþi articles on this wiki. The system transcribes sounds as follows: The sounds /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ are transcribed in this system as ⟨Śś⟩ and ⟨Źź⟩ respectively, however they are not included in the standard alphabet since they are not native phonemes. When included in the alphabet, they are both sorted between ⟨Zz⟩ and ⟨Çç⟩.

The Kajdra System
This system was developed in response to the complaint that the non-Latin characters used in the Stón system are often difficult to type. For this reason, the Kajdra system was developed using only Latin characters. * /β/ should be transcribed with a B with acute, but this character is not encoded in Unicode and is therefore replaced with B with dot above here.

** /ɴ/ is sometimes also seen written as ⟨Ǹǹ⟩ or ⟨N̂n̂⟩.

The foreign sounds /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ are transcribed in this system as ⟨Śś⟩ and ⟨Źź⟩ respectively, however they are not included in the standard alphabet since they are not native phonemes. When included in the alphabet, they are both sorted between ⟨Zz⟩ and ⟨Çç⟩.

The Perdis System
The Perdis system was also developed in response to complaints about the earlier system. The Kajdra system resolved the issue of non-Latin characters, however the large number of characters with uncommon diacritics still hindered its use. The Perdis system resolves this problem by scrapping non-Latin and diacritical characters in exchange for digraphs, allowing it to remain within the ASCII character set. This system however suffers from the loss of a one-to-one phoneme-to-glyph ratio, and is therefore rarely used except for when the writer is limited to ASCII characters. This system may require apostrophes to divide vowel clusters that could be mistaken as digraphs. Unlike the other transliteration system, when this system is used for dictionaries and other similar resources, words are sorted using the standard Latin alphabet order, digraphs do not count as distinct letters. This means that, while "tel" comes before "hajla" in the Stón and Kajdra systems, in the Perdis system, "hayla" comes before "tel." The above chart is in that order only for comparison reasons with the other two systems.