A unified alphabet for Mari languages based on Latin script

<aside> <img src="/icons/language_blue.svg" alt="/icons/language_blue.svg" width="40px" /> This article in Mari

Эта статья на русском языке

</aside>

• Table of contents:

Alphabet

Rules

• The letters B, F, Q, W, X are only used in loanwords, and not included in the alphabet.
  • The letter B is absent from the alphabet because it only occurs in /mb/ consonant cluster. It is written as “mp” instead.
• In Hill Mari, the umlaut is only placed on its first occurence (ie. the first occurence of Ää, Öö, Üü or Ÿÿ):
  • пӹцкемӹшӓлтӓш → pÿckemysaltas (pronounced as /pɘt͡skemɘʃæltæʃ/, not /pɘt͡skemɤʃaltaʃ/)
  • Öü digraph in Northwestern Mari is treated as a single grapheme, therefore нӫмӓл → nöümal, not nöumal.
• Due to presence of s+z and z+s sequences, these are written as szz and zss respectively, to avoid confusion with sz and zs digraphs:
  • талышжап → talyszzap (pronounced /taləʃʒap/, not /taləsʒap/; the sequence /sʒ/ does not exist in Mari languages)
  • ужшаш → uzssas (pronounced /uʒʃaʃ/, not /uzʃas/; the sequence /zʃ/ exists only in the word teñyzssüdyr [теҥызшӱдыр], and it can be listed as an exception)
• Doubled consonants that are denoted by digraphs have the first letter repeated:
  • cs + cs → ccs (not to be confused with css, which is cs + s)
  • sz + sz → ssz (not to be confused with szz, which is s + z)
  • zs + zs → zzs (not to be confused with zss, which is z + s)
  • lj + lj → llj
  • nj + nj → nnj
  • tj + tj → ttj

<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_blue.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_blue.svg" width="40px" /> The letters Ää and Ÿÿ are only used for Hill Mari and Northwestern Mari. The digraph Tj is only used for Hill Mari onomatopoeia and in some loanwords. The letter Cc is pronounced as /t͡s/ in Hill Mari, and the digraph Cs is pronounced as /t͡ʃ/.

</aside>

<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_green.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_green.svg" width="40px" /> The letter Cc is pronounced as /t͡ʃ/ in Meadow Mari, because the /t͡s/ phoneme is not present in Meadow Mari.

</aside>

<aside> <img src="/icons/info-alternate_purple.svg" alt="/icons/info-alternate_purple.svg" width="40px" /> The digraphs Ou and Öü are only used for Northwestern Mari.

</aside>

Example texts:

Hill Mari

Meadow Mari

(I know these aren’t the best text samples in terms of vocabulary, but this is all I could find for now, and I am planning to change them later on)

Commentary

After months of experimenting and researching, I finally present to you the Mari Latin alphabet. Without further ado, let me get to the explanations of the grapheme choices:

• Letters S and Z were chosen for /ʃ/ and /ʒ/ in analogy with Hungarian language, which similarly to Mari languages has much more frequent /ʃ/ than /s/. However, opposite to Hungarian, the Mari languages have more frequent /ʒ/ than /z/, therefore I chose a single letter for the more frequent phoneme, and the Sz and Zs digraphs for the less frequent phonemes. Yes, /ʃʒ/ and /ʒʃ/ sequences do exist, but I already made a solution for this.
  • Also in analogy with the Hungarian alphabet I chose C and Cs for /t͡s/ and /t͡ʃ/ respectively for Hill Mari. Meadow Mari doesn’t require a letter that would denote a /t͡s/ sound, therefore in Meadow Mari the letter C denotes the phoneme /t͡ʃ/.
• The Lj, Nj, Tj digraphs were chosen firstly due to already existing usage of denoting /ʎ/ /ɲ/ and /c/ this way, and likewise, in analogy with the Hungarian ly, ny, ty. I didn’t add letters with diacritics for those, because that would clutter the text more than I want, for such infrequent phonemes. /lj/, /nj/ and /tj/ sequences do not exist in roots, and on compound word boundary they could .
• And finally, special thanks to @p6ialpoiss (on Discord; a.k.a. lil tsar#6059) for inventing the Ou and Öü digraphs for Northwestern Mari. This digraph is as intuitive as possible, pointing to the pronounciation of the unique vowels of Northwestern Mari — ө and ӫ — being between o and u, and ö and ü respectively. Seriously, you can check the pronounciation of /ʊ/ and /ʏ/ on the IPA vowel chart yourself.

Also, the reason I chose digraphs in the first place, is to simplify the alphabet. My goal when making this alphabet wasn’t to make it fully phonemic, as such notation is only truly necessary for linguistic purposes, and for which UPA and IPA already exists. My goal was to make this alphabet realistically usable in daily communication. Even though it might not get widespread soon, I still keep my hopes up.

Using digraphs has made this alphabet very handy. An earlier variant I had had the letters č, ž, ľ, ń, ť, atop ñ, ä, ö, ü and ÿ — that’s 10 (!) extra letters (7 for Meadow Mari). After researching Mari phonology, the current variant happened to be the most convenient one, and it has only 5 extra letters: Ñ, Ä, Ö, Ü and Ÿ. Add in consideration that the most widespread variant of Mari, Meadow Mari, doesn’t have Ä and Ÿ, and that’s only 3 extra letters for majority of Mari users.

And that’s it for now. If you have any ideas or suggestions, or wanna discuss this, please contact me following the link below.

— @ostakkale