ʈ <ṭ>
ɖ <ḍ>
ɳ <ṇ>
ʂ <ṣ>
ʐ <ẓ>
ɽ/ ɻ <ṛ>

ʋ

l

j

Table 1 shows the consonant inventory of Middle Pahran given in IPA, with their current romanized values

in angle brackets. The analysis taken here is somewhat “surfacy” in some places, and includes some phonemes
that a linguist studying this language may or may not include if Middle Pahran was a natlang being studied. More
on this surfacy analysis is discussed in the next section.

Ultimately, assigning graphemes to the consonants was not difficult. In many cases, the IPA values
themselves are quite suitable, and in other cases there were very commonly used pairings that fit in easily, such as
<’> for /ʔ/ and for /j/. For the retroflexes, I initially used an overdot except for <ṭ> and <ḍ> (which don’t look
good with overdots), but on looking into it, I decided it would be better to borrow the tradition from Indic
languages of using underdot for all retroflexes – again, leveraging the fact that some in my audience will be
familiar with these languages. Looking into this even inspired me to change my phonology somewhat – the
retroflex rhotic was originally the retroflex approximant /ɻ/, but on finding that <ṛ> often represents a retroflex
tap, I decided that there would be dialectal variation between [ɽ] and [ɻ], which fits nicely with a planned
divergence in daughter languages, where this phoneme will merge with /ʐ/ in some daughters, and with /ɾ/ in
others.

Similarly to the underdot convention, I borrowed <ġ> from a convention used in Arabic for a similar sound

to Middle Pahran /ɢ/ — and I have already planned to look into what happens to /ɢ/ in Arabic dialects as
inspiration for changes in Middle Pahran’s daughter languages. It also helped that this fit with the visual style of
using dots elsewhere, which was absent with other choices I had gone with early on (namely and <ĝ>).

3

The vowels were much more challenging. Large vowel systems are always hard to romanize because the
Latin alphabet was only designed to have five. Middle Pahran has nine vowels, shown with IPA values in Table 2,
which also needed to be distinguished on length and nasalization. There was never a question for me that I would
represent long vowels by doubling the vowel character. It was always the most intuitive way for me to represent
long vowels, and in general I will always choose that option unless there is some reason it comes into conflict with
another convention. A note on the representation of vowels – [y ø ɯ ɤ] are actually not phonemic in Middle
Pahran, being allophones of /u o i e/ respectively. As such, I will always place these phones in square brackets []. I
will discuss my reasons for representing them separately in the romanization in the next section.

Of course, because I need to use vowel doubling, that makes it unworkable to use digraphs for vowel
quality, so I needed one unique character for each vowel quality. This led to one of my first drafts of the vowel
romanization scheme, presented in Table 3. There are a few things to note in this romanization scheme. Notice
that I have used for [y]. At this point in my work, /j/ had been represented with rather than to make
room for this choice. I also chose to represent [ɤ], not too far from the Cherokee use of for /ə̃/.

Table 2 Middle Pahran Vowels

front

back

front

back

front

back

unround

round

unround

round

unround

round

unround

round

unround

round

unround

round

high

mid

low

i

e

y

ø

ɯ

ɤ

a

u

o

iː

eː

yː

øː

ɯː

ɤː

uː

oː

ẽː

ø̃ː

aː

—

ãː

ɤ̃ː

õː

However, as my plans formed for the future of Middle Pahran, I decided that one future divergence of
dialects would include changing [ʋ] to [v] and [j] to [ʒ], and possibly the introduction of [dʐ]. This means that, if I
want to keep romanizations consistent in daughter languages, it would be very useful to plan ahead now and keep
and available. Another change in later revisions of the phonology was in the method of denoting nasal
vowels. Through the process of learning Hoocąk2, I have gotten used to the idea of using the ogonek for
nasalization, which opened up some options for the other vowels. I dislike stacking up multiple diacritics on top of
a character, so I had avoided using the umlaut on the grounds that it would lead to using <ö> for [ø] and thus leave
me with <ṏṏ> or <ö̃ö̃> for [ø̃ː]3. Your mileage may vary, but that just looks ugly to me – that just has too many
hats. However, if I switched to ogoneks, I’d get <ǫ̈ǫ̈>, which looks quite nice and balanced.

Table 3 Early draft vowel romanization

front

back

front

back

front

back

unround

round

unround

round

unround

round

unround

round

unround

round

unround

round

high

mid

low

i
e

û
v

y
ø

a

u
o

ii
ee

yy
øø

ûû
vv

uu
oo

—

ẽẽ

ø̃ø̃

ṽṽ

õõ

aa

ãã

Thus, internal history considerations edged out and as vowel letters. /y/ was now represented

with <ü>, in symmetry with having <ö> for [ø], freeing to once again be used for /j/. In addition, when I

2 Hoocąk is a Siouan language spoken by a Native American nation of the same name (also called Ho-chunk or
Winnebago, though the last can be taken as pejorative) in a number of places in Wisconsin and on the Winnebago
Reservation in Nebraska.
3 More on why I still maintain the double-letter system in nasalized vowels in the next section.

4

presented this along with several other romanization options to the Constructed Languages Facebook Group and
to the /r/conlangs subreddit, quite a few people disliked <û> for [ɯ]. Looking at it, I understood the sentiment. It is
rather off the wall, especially in my earlier systems, where it was the only non-systematic diacritic. To counter this,
I did at one point try <ô> for [ɤ], as well as <î ê> for [ɯ ɤ], but there’s also just no precedent for using circumflex
for either unround or back that I know of. Ultimately, the issue with back unrounded vowels is that there are few
options. Coming from natlangs, your options for [ɯ] are <ı> used in some Turkic languages, and <ư>, which is used
in Vietnamese and brings with it an option for [ɤ] in the form of <ơ>. Both of these options were repeatedly
suggested to me, but I strongly resisted them on aesthetic grounds – I didn’t like the look of them. However, I
discovered in my experimentation that <ǫ̛ǫ̛> seemed a pretty cute representation for [ɤ̃ː]. I was aware that <ỡ>
existed of course, but in my opinion, that would actually be somewhat detrimental to accessibility. Anyone familiar
with Vietnamese would see <ỡ> and think of the Vietnamese “breaking” tone, and I did not want to confuse
people. So, I went with horns, ogoneks and umlauts, producing the romanization seen in Table 4.

Table 4 Horn-ogonek-umlaut romanization

front

back

front

back

front

back

unround

round

unround

round

unround

round

unround

round

unround

round

unround

round

High

Mid

Low

i
e

ư
ơ

ü
ö

a

u
o

ii
ee

üü
öö

ưư
ơơ

uu
oo

—

ęę

ǫ̈ǫ̈

ǫ̛ǫ̛

ǫǫ

aa

ąą

However, this was not the final romanization for the vowel system of Middle Pahran, and I ended up using

instead <ı> for [ɯ] and <ë> for [ɤ]. More on that decision is discussed in section 4. I also have not exhaustively
listed all the options that I considered, nor all the suggestions I received as I presented different romanization
schemes to the community. In the following section, I will go over a few notes about how the romanization I chose
perhaps overspecifies the phonology of Middle Pahran.

3 PHONOLOGICAL ANALYSIS AND OVERSPECIFICATION

By overspecification, I mean drawing distinctions that are not present in the phonology. It is not entirely
uncommon for romanizations to overspecify the phonology of a language. For instance, in Mandarin Chinese, it is
possible to analyze the palatals [t͡ɕ t͡ɕʰ ɕ] as allophones of /k kʰ x/ (Duanmu 2007)4, but most romanizations of the
language have represented them with separate characters.

There are several places where the Middle Pahran romanization could be seen as overspecifying the
phonology. The most obvious place is, ironically, in the vowel system. As I noted in the previous section, the
secondary cardinals in Middle Pahran [y ɯ ø ɤ] are not actually phonemic. This is a result of the evolution of
Middle Pahran’s vowel system. Old Pahran had a three vowel system /i a u/. There were two sources for the mid
vowels, nasalization and lowering due to a preceding /q/ or /ħ/. The primary cardinal mid-vowels /e o/ became
phonemic when /ħ/ merged with /h/ (and, in some environments, was subsequently deleted).

The only source for [y ɯ ø ɤ] is vowel harmony. I do have a simple sound change planned for daughter
languages that will make [y ø] phonemic, but in Middle Pahran they are still allophonic variants of /u/ and /o/.
Ironically, if I kept to a more elegant system, I would have had a much easier time with the vowels – I would only
need to use five. The choice to represent these sounds was instead a nod to accessibility – I wanted to highlight

4 This is only one possible analysis. In addition, Duanmu (2007) has an interesting analysis for Mandarin vowels
which collapses all the mid vowels to underlying /ə/.

5

the existence of the vowel harmony system at this stage of the language, and aid pronunciation. In addition, the
potential for these vowels to become phonemic in the future makes figuring out how to represent them now quite
useful.

Another potential overspecification is seen in the retroflexes. The only historical source I have for

retroflexes in Middle Pahran (other than [ɽ~ɻ]) is the result of assimilation of a preceding retroflex rhotic, which
was subsequently deleted with compensatory lengthening. Since /l/ and /ɾ/ also underwent deletion with
compensatory lengthening, it is possible to find minimal pairs – at the time of this writing, none existed in the
lexicon, however I was able to create a term haas ‘monkey’ (< *hals), in opposition to haaṣ ‘foot’ (<*haɻs)5. However, this change is still morphologically visible, and the deleted codas can still be recovered in some cases, as is illustrated in (1-2). In the examples below the perfective is formed with the suffix –su, and the irrealis with -‘un (the glottal stop is deleted when following a consonant). The examples in (1) show both the application of retroflex assimilation and the recovery of the underlying /ɻ/ in the verb stem when followed by a vowel. The examples in (2) show that both /l/ and /ɾ/ can also be recovered in the same way. (1) makeep ‘to push’ guuṇııp ‘to turn’ (2) sannuup ‘to cook’ fyakaap ‘to yell’ mümakeeṣӧ ‘she pushed (perfective)’ muguuṇııṣu ‘she turned (perf.)’ musannuusu ‘she cooked (perf.)’ mufyakaaso ‘she yelled (perf.)’ mümakeṛӧn ‘she might push’ muguunıṛun ‘she might turn’ musannurun ‘she might cook’ mufyakalon ‘she might yell’ Thus, a particularly reductive phonologist could conclude that the retroflex series is entirely the result of assimilation to a preceding /ɻ/, and that the deletion with compensatory lengthening is still active in the languages. There is one argument against this analysis: where there is a long vowel that is not followed by a retroflex, the identity of the deleted liquid is often not recoverable, as not all environments will be subject to the morphophonology present above. For instance, in briiza ‘donkey’, it’s not possible to determine whether the deleted liquid was /l/ or /ɾ/. In taaba ‘body’, it’s impossible to eliminate any of the liquids, as the long vowel is not followed by a coronal. In any case, the point is that I chose to represent the retroflexes separately not to support some particular phonological analysis for my own conlang, but to help linguistically-savvy readers accurately pronounce the language. I will not belabor the point by going into great detail, but there are some similar arguments to be made for nasalized vowels, which also have only one source (nasal deletion), with the etymology recoverable through morphology (arguably much more consistently than for retroflexes and long vowels derived from liquid deletion). In that case, I considered simply leaving the etymological coda nasals to mark nasalization, but the nasalization rule is fiddly enough that I felt it would be good to mark it. However, I will point out that I did get at least one suggestion not to bother with doubled vowels for nasalized vowels, since they are always long. Again, I could have made them single vowel letters, but I felt I wanted to remind the reader of the fact that they are long. Also, future daughter languages may also have short nasal vowels, so it is helpful to be consistent. I did not always bow down to accessibility and overspecify my romanization. At a certain point, always overspecifying will just lead to insanity – I might as well just give people audio files or, worse, spectrograms. That is not going to be helpful at all. And in any case, there are other considerations. For instance, there is a rule that causes non-coronal stops to become labialized before a rounded vowel – with a related rule that turns stop+/ʋ/ into a labialized stop. I decided not to represent surface forms there, partly as a nod to elegance, but mostly because an attempt to represent all the labialization occurring due to rounded vowels would lead to an unsightly proliferation of — in other words, an aesthetic consideration.

5 It is interesting that identifying phonemes in a conlang is different from doing so in a natlang. In a historically-
derived conlang, where all sound changes are known, I imagine you could mathematically prove that two phones
will always appear in complementary distribution.

6

4 KEYBOARD AND UNICODE TROUBLES

In section 1, I noted that in addition to the original four parameters, a fifth parameter for evaluating

romanizations might be technical factors. The fact is, computers rule our world, and if you have any intention of
sharing your conlang to the world, it will be quite useful for people to be able to type it. There are materials out
there about converting original scripts into fonts (Watkins 2013; Peterson 2015:chap. 4), but here my focus is on
romanizations, and if your conlang contains any diacritics or letters not used in English, you are most likely going to
have to wrangle with Unicode.

Figure 1 Problems rendering <ǫ̛>

As I mentioned in section 2, I had to get rid of my horns in the final version of my romanization because of

technical issues. To illustrate this point, Figure 1 shows what happens when I attempt to put <ǫ̛> into SIL
FieldWorks Language Explorer (FLeX), which I have been using to manage my lexicon. The problem arises due to
the use of combining characters. In Unicode, there are some diacritic-bearing characters, such as <ü>, <ö>, <ư>,
<á>, <ñ>, and many, many others, which have their own code-points. These tend to be characters that are
frequently used in natural languages, so that a separate code point would be useful. Even some characters with
multiple diacritics, such as the aforementioned <ỡ>, have their own code points. However, when you are putting
multiple diacritics on a character, or even just applying a diacritic to characters it’s not usually used with, you will
probably have to resort to adding combining diacritics. In theory, a combining diacritic is supposed to work like a
ligature – they are designed to neatly attach to the previous character to form a new visual character. Some
programs just convert all characters with diacritics to a sequence of main character plus combining diacritic. If you
ever hit backspace and delete just a diacritic, rather than the whole character, you are dealing with combining
diacritics.

Unfortunately, fonts do not always fully support all combinations, and that is what happened with <ǫ̛>. I
created my <ǫ̛> by taking <ǫ> (U+01EB: LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH OGONEK) and adding the combining form of
the horn (U+031B: COMBINING HORN), and FLeX’s font choked on that, improperly attaching the horn. I also tried
to go the other direction, starting with <ơ> and adding a combining ogonek, but I ran into a similar problem with
the ogonek not attaching properly. Ultimately, I ended up ditching the horns entirely, since it would not make

7

much sense having only one. For [ɤ] I chose <ë>, since the umlaut plays pretty nicely with the ogonek6, and for [ɯ]
I went with <ı>7. The final form of the vowel romanization scheme is presented in Table 5.

Table 5 Final Middle Pahran vowel romanization

front

back

front

back

front

back

unround

round

unround

round

unround

round

unround

round

unround

round

unround

round

high

mid

low

i

e

ı

ë

ü

ö

a

u

o

ii

ee

üü

öö

ıı

ëë

uu

oo

—

ęę

ǫ̈ǫ̈

ę̈ę̈

ǫǫ

aa

ąą

With my romanization squared away, I wanted to create a keyboard in order to be able to type Middle

Pahran. For the task I used Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator (MSKLC), because it is free and I use Windows. I did
not have to change anything about the romanization due to my keyboard, but I thought I would mention a couple
of points in the design of the keyboard. Figure 2 shows the default values of each key. Figure 3 (page 9) shows the
keyboard values when Shift is held.

Figure 2 Middle Pahran Keyboard (default state)

The three grey keys are dead keys. Dead keys return different values depending on the next key

pressed. They are useful for typing diacritics and ligatures. I chose to use the semicolon key as a dead key for
ogonek because I was already familiar with that from the Hoocąk keyboard I use. The quotation marks, similarly,
are the dead key for diaeresis on the US-International keyboard. I chose the period for all my dotted consonant
characters <ṛ ṣ ṭ ḍ ẓ ġ> simply because it seemed the most intuitive choice.

6 However, while preparing this for submission, I attempted to use LyX to make a LaTeX version, and found out that
LyX cannot handle combining diaeresis properly. The nightmare only continues.
7 I did also test capital letters for everything, though I have presented only the lower case versions. One thing that
made me reticent about using <ı> was what to do about the capital letters, until I looked it up and found out that
in Turkish, capital is in fact <İ>, an with an overdot. It looks funny, but it satisfied me well enough.