Rheinische Dokumenta
Encyclopedia
The Rheinische Dokumenta is a phonetic writing system developed in the early 1980s by a working group of academics, linguists, local language experts, and local language speakers of the Rhineland
.
It was presented to the public in 1986 by the Landschaftsverband Rheinland.
It offers a uniform common notation of almost every phoneme
spoken in the Lower Rhine
area, the western and central Rhineland, the Berg region, the Westerwald
, Eifel
, and Hunsrück
mountain regions, plus the areas surrounding the Nahe
and Moselle River
s.
It encompasses the dialect
s of cities such as
Aachen
,
Bingen
,
Bonn
,
Cologne
,
Duisburg
,
Düsseldorf
,
Eschweiler (in Germany)
,
Eschweiler (in Luxembourg)
,
Essen
,
Eupen
,
Gennep
,
Gummersbach
,
Heinsberg
,
Karlsruhe
,
Kaiserslautern
,
Kerkrade
,
Cleves
,
Koblenz
,
Limburg
,
Ludwigshafen
,
Luxembourg
,
Maastricht
,
Mainz
,
Malmedy
,
Mönchengladbach
,
Nijmegen,
Oberhausen
,
Prüm
,
Raeren
,
Saarbrücken
,
Siegen
,
Trier
,
Venlo
,
St. Vith,
Wiesbaden
,
Wipperfürth
,
Wuppertal
,
Xanten
,
and many more.
Rheinische Dokumenta was designed to be rather easily readable for dialect speakers educated in German writing, but there are some differences that make it quite distinct from the usual ways of writing the dialects: There is no doubling of consonants to mark short vowels, and there are extra diacritical marks. The German letters ⟨z⟩ and ⟨x⟩ are spelt out as ⟨ts⟩ and ⟨ks⟩, German ⟨ch⟩ is spelt ⟨k⟩ when it indicates a /k/ pronunciation, German ⟨qu⟩ is spelt ⟨kw⟩. These spellings appear in other Germanic languages as well, but Rhinelanders are generally not accustomed to it.
of today's basic Latin alphabet, without ⟨c⟩, ⟨q⟩, ⟨x⟩, ⟨y⟩, ⟨z⟩, though it has the digraphs
⟨ch⟩, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ng⟩, trigraph
⟨sch⟩. In addition, the three common German
Umlaut
ed letters are used: ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨ü⟩.
Each letter, digraph, or trigraph is strictly representing one phone.
Most letters represent the usual sounds for which they are used in the German alphabet
or, slightly less so, in the Dutch alphabet
or that of the Luxembourgish language
. Several letters are ambiguous in these languages, such as voiced consonants which lose their voice when appearing at the end of a word. These ambiguities are avoided writing Rheinische Dokumenta; despite the fact that word stems may change their printed appearance, when declined
or conjugated
, always the most phonetically correct letters, digraphs, or trigraphs are being used.
, the combination of ⟨s⟩ followed by ⟨ch⟩ does not occur in the languages for which Rheinische Dokumenta was made. Thus, since ⟨c⟩ is not otherwise used in Rheinische Dokumenta, both ⟨ch
⟩ and ⟨sch⟩ are unambiguous, especially the underlined letter combinations, and the ones having an arch below.
Only the digraph ⟨ng⟩ has some ambiguity. An ⟨n⟩ may occur at the end of a syllable
, but only a few dialects allow a syllable-initial after a syllable final ⟨n⟩. While ⟨ng⟩ at syllable joints is frequent in German, most languages that can use Rheinische Dokumenta have ⟨mg⟩ or ⟨nj⟩ instead in almost all instances. The Authors of Rheinische Dokumenta suggest using the single letter eng
⟨ŋ⟩ instead of the digraph ⟨ng⟩ when possible.
, as standard German
writing does.
, and the tonal accents, are usually ignored when writing in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are diacritics to indicate them, though, but since they are seen to considerably hamper readability, make prints ugly, and are hardly necessary to facilitate understanding, they are seldom used. Some dialects do not have tonal accents anyway. For the other ones, there are only very few word pairs or triplets
having identical unaccented Rheinische Dokumenta spellings, but different tonal or stress accents.
Also, other prosody
, such as the "melody" of sentence, which carries semantic information in many Rheinisch languages,http://www.archive.org/stream/grammatikderrip00mngoog#page/n18/mode/1up (Novembre, 5, 2009) is not preserved in Rheinische Dokumenta writing.
The "e̩" is a so-called schwa
.
There is no long version of "e̩".
Although a schwa usually cannot have the word accent, or stress, in some dialects there are exceptions. Words having only schwas do have their stresses on schwas, and they can receive the main stress within a sentence as well. The Colognian
word (in Rheinische Dokumenta writing) is an example.
There is another schwa. It does not have a corresponding grapheme in Rheinische Dokumenta. It could be noted in IPA as an unstressed short [ɔ̆], in some dialects and positions also as an unstressed short ɐ. Some publications call it a "vocalic r". It is almost always followed by a glottal stop
. Glottal stops are not noted in Rheinische Dokumenta, even though they are phoneme
s occasionally having minimal pair
s, and a length attribute. Since this Schwa almost always corresponds to the digraph "er" ending a word or a separable syllable prefix of Standard German orthography, most users of Rheinische Dokumenta positionally print "er", or "e̩r", respectively, for increased readability in an attempt of courtesy towards their readers who read German more fluently than Rheinische Dokumenta. From the standpoint of phonological writing, this is incorrect.
"e̩", there is a corresponding long vowel:
" would be spellt: "bǫi" in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are occasions, when two monophthongs need to be written together without forming a diphthong, that means, they are pronounced separately with either a glottal stop
or an intervocalic joiner consonant "j" in between. There is no written distinction between these cases, although it is not forbidden to write the character "j" for clarity. The number of diphthongs existing in a dialect is far less than each possible combination of two vowels, thus there are not very many ambiguities when taking syllable structuer into account.
Assimilation
and coarticulation
are predominant in most of the languages written using Rheinische Dokumenta, thus diphthong articulation
may deviate somewhat from the articulation of the isolated monophthongs. Also, depending on languages, the lengths of their diphthongs may vary considerably between the extremes of as short as a typical short monophthong to longer than the sum of two long monophthongs. Varying lengths of diphthongs are not noted in Rheinische Dokumenta, which at least does not create ambiguities within a dialect.
, they would be written in a manner analoguous to the diphthongs, using three adjacent letters of vocals.
The Rheinische Dokumenta is a phonetic writing system developed in the early 1980s by a working group of academics, linguists, local language experts, and local language speakers of the Rhineland
.
It was presented to the public in 1986 by the Landschaftsverband Rheinland.
It offers a uniform common notation of almost every phoneme
spoken in the Lower Rhine
area, the western and central Rhineland, the Berg region, the Westerwald
, Eifel
, and Hunsrück
mountain regions, plus the areas surrounding the Nahe
and Moselle River
s.
It encompasses the dialect
s of cities such as
Aachen
,
Bingen
,
Bonn
,
Cologne
,
Duisburg
,
Düsseldorf
,
Eschweiler (in Germany)
,
Eschweiler (in Luxembourg)
,
Essen
,
Eupen
,
Gennep
,
Gummersbach
,
Heinsberg
,
Karlsruhe
,
Kaiserslautern
,
Kerkrade
,
Cleves
,
Koblenz
,
Limburg
,
Ludwigshafen
,
Luxembourg
,
Maastricht
,
Mainz
,
Malmedy
,
Mönchengladbach
,
Nijmegen,
Oberhausen
,
Prüm
,
Raeren
,
Saarbrücken
,
Siegen
,
Trier
,
Venlo
,
St. Vith,
Wiesbaden
,
Wipperfürth
,
Wuppertal
,
Xanten
,
and many more.
Rheinische Dokumenta was designed to be rather easily readable for dialect speakers educated in German writing, but there are some differences that make it quite distinct from the usual ways of writing the dialects: There is no doubling of consonants to mark short vowels, and there are extra diacritical marks. The German letters ⟨z⟩ and ⟨x⟩ are spelt out as ⟨ts⟩ and ⟨ks⟩, German ⟨ch⟩ is spelt ⟨k⟩ when it indicates a /k/ pronunciation, German ⟨qu⟩ is spelt ⟨kw⟩. These spellings appear in other Germanic languages as well, but Rhinelanders are generally not accustomed to it.
of today's basic Latin alphabet, without ⟨c⟩, ⟨q⟩, ⟨x⟩, ⟨y⟩, ⟨z⟩, though it has the digraphs
⟨ch⟩, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ng⟩, trigraph
⟨sch⟩. In addition, the three common German
Umlaut
ed letters are used: ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨ü⟩.
Each letter, digraph, or trigraph is strictly representing one phone.
Most letters represent the usual sounds for which they are used in the German alphabet
or, slightly less so, in the Dutch alphabet
or that of the Luxembourgish language
. Several letters are ambiguous in these languages, such as voiced consonants which lose their voice when appearing at the end of a word. These ambiguities are avoided writing Rheinische Dokumenta; despite the fact that word stems may change their printed appearance, when declined
or conjugated
, always the most phonetically correct letters, digraphs, or trigraphs are being used.
, the combination of ⟨s⟩ followed by ⟨ch⟩ does not occur in the languages for which Rheinische Dokumenta was made. Thus, since ⟨c⟩ is not otherwise used in Rheinische Dokumenta, both ⟨ch
⟩ and ⟨sch⟩ are unambiguous, especially the underlined letter combinations, and the ones having an arch below.
Only the digraph ⟨ng⟩ has some ambiguity. An ⟨n⟩ may occur at the end of a syllable
, but only a few dialects allow a syllable-initial after a syllable final ⟨n⟩. While ⟨ng⟩ at syllable joints is frequent in German, most languages that can use Rheinische Dokumenta have ⟨mg⟩ or ⟨nj⟩ instead in almost all instances. The Authors of Rheinische Dokumenta suggest using the single letter eng
⟨ŋ⟩ instead of the digraph ⟨ng⟩ when possible.
, as standard German
writing does.
, and the tonal accents, are usually ignored when writing in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are diacritics to indicate them, though, but since they are seen to considerably hamper readability, make prints ugly, and are hardly necessary to facilitate understanding, they are seldom used. Some dialects do not have tonal accents anyway. For the other ones, there are only very few word pairs or triplets
having identical unaccented Rheinische Dokumenta spellings, but different tonal or stress accents.
Also, other prosody
, such as the "melody" of sentence, which carries semantic information in many Rheinisch languages,http://www.archive.org/stream/grammatikderrip00mngoog#page/n18/mode/1up (Novembre, 5, 2009) is not preserved in Rheinische Dokumenta writing.
The "e̩" is a so-called schwa
.
There is no long version of "e̩".
Although a schwa usually cannot have the word accent, or stress, in some dialects there are exceptions. Words having only schwas do have their stresses on schwas, and they can receive the main stress within a sentence as well. The Colognian
word (in Rheinische Dokumenta writing) is an example.
There is another schwa. It does not have a corresponding grapheme in Rheinische Dokumenta. It could be noted in IPA as an unstressed short [ɔ̆], in some dialects and positions also as an unstressed short ɐ. Some publications call it a "vocalic r". It is almost always followed by a glottal stop
. Glottal stops are not noted in Rheinische Dokumenta, even though they are phoneme
s occasionally having minimal pair
s, and a length attribute. Since this Schwa almost always corresponds to the digraph "er" ending a word or a separable syllable prefix of Standard German orthography, most users of Rheinische Dokumenta positionally print "er", or "e̩r", respectively, for increased readability in an attempt of courtesy towards their readers who read German more fluently than Rheinische Dokumenta. From the standpoint of phonological writing, this is incorrect.
"e̩", there is a corresponding long vowel:
" would be spellt: "bǫi" in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are occasions, when two monophthongs need to be written together without forming a diphthong, that means, they are pronounced separately with either a glottal stop
or an intervocalic joiner consonant "j" in between. There is no written distinction between these cases, although it is not forbidden to write the character "j" for clarity. The number of diphthongs existing in a dialect is far less than each possible combination of two vowels, thus there are not very many ambiguities when taking syllable structuer into account.
Assimilation
and coarticulation
are predominant in most of the languages written using Rheinische Dokumenta, thus diphthong articulation
may deviate somewhat from the articulation of the isolated monophthongs. Also, depending on languages, the lengths of their diphthongs may vary considerably between the extremes of as short as a typical short monophthong to longer than the sum of two long monophthongs. Varying lengths of diphthongs are not noted in Rheinische Dokumenta, which at least does not create ambiguities within a dialect.
, they would be written in a manner analoguous to the diphthongs, using three adjacent letters of vocals.
The Rheinische Dokumenta is a phonetic writing system developed in the early 1980s by a working group of academics, linguists, local language experts, and local language speakers of the Rhineland
.
It was presented to the public in 1986 by the Landschaftsverband Rheinland.
It offers a uniform common notation of almost every phoneme
spoken in the Lower Rhine
area, the western and central Rhineland, the Berg region, the Westerwald
, Eifel
, and Hunsrück
mountain regions, plus the areas surrounding the Nahe
and Moselle River
s.
It encompasses the dialect
s of cities such as
Aachen
,
Bingen
,
Bonn
,
Cologne
,
Duisburg
,
Düsseldorf
,
Eschweiler (in Germany)
,
Eschweiler (in Luxembourg)
,
Essen
,
Eupen
,
Gennep
,
Gummersbach
,
Heinsberg
,
Karlsruhe
,
Kaiserslautern
,
Kerkrade
,
Cleves
,
Koblenz
,
Limburg
,
Ludwigshafen
,
Luxembourg
,
Maastricht
,
Mainz
,
Malmedy
,
Mönchengladbach
,
Nijmegen,
Oberhausen
,
Prüm
,
Raeren
,
Saarbrücken
,
Siegen
,
Trier
,
Venlo
,
St. Vith,
Wiesbaden
,
Wipperfürth
,
Wuppertal
,
Xanten
,
and many more.
Rheinische Dokumenta was designed to be rather easily readable for dialect speakers educated in German writing, but there are some differences that make it quite distinct from the usual ways of writing the dialects: There is no doubling of consonants to mark short vowels, and there are extra diacritical marks. The German letters ⟨z⟩ and ⟨x⟩ are spelt out as ⟨ts⟩ and ⟨ks⟩, German ⟨ch⟩ is spelt ⟨k⟩ when it indicates a /k/ pronunciation, German ⟨qu⟩ is spelt ⟨kw⟩. These spellings appear in other Germanic languages as well, but Rhinelanders are generally not accustomed to it.
of today's basic Latin alphabet, without ⟨c⟩, ⟨q⟩, ⟨x⟩, ⟨y⟩, ⟨z⟩, though it has the digraphs
⟨ch⟩, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ng⟩, trigraph
⟨sch⟩. In addition, the three common German
Umlaut
ed letters are used: ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨ü⟩.
Each letter, digraph, or trigraph is strictly representing one phone.
Most letters represent the usual sounds for which they are used in the German alphabet
or, slightly less so, in the Dutch alphabet
or that of the Luxembourgish language
. Several letters are ambiguous in these languages, such as voiced consonants which lose their voice when appearing at the end of a word. These ambiguities are avoided writing Rheinische Dokumenta; despite the fact that word stems may change their printed appearance, when declined
or conjugated
, always the most phonetically correct letters, digraphs, or trigraphs are being used.
, the combination of ⟨s⟩ followed by ⟨ch⟩ does not occur in the languages for which Rheinische Dokumenta was made. Thus, since ⟨c⟩ is not otherwise used in Rheinische Dokumenta, both ⟨ch
⟩ and ⟨sch⟩ are unambiguous, especially the underlined letter combinations, and the ones having an arch below.
Only the digraph ⟨ng⟩ has some ambiguity. An ⟨n⟩ may occur at the end of a syllable
, but only a few dialects allow a syllable-initial after a syllable final ⟨n⟩. While ⟨ng⟩ at syllable joints is frequent in German, most languages that can use Rheinische Dokumenta have ⟨mg⟩ or ⟨nj⟩ instead in almost all instances. The Authors of Rheinische Dokumenta suggest using the single letter eng
⟨ŋ⟩ instead of the digraph ⟨ng⟩ when possible.
, as standard German
writing does.
, and the tonal accents, are usually ignored when writing in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are diacritics to indicate them, though, but since they are seen to considerably hamper readability, make prints ugly, and are hardly necessary to facilitate understanding, they are seldom used. Some dialects do not have tonal accents anyway. For the other ones, there are only very few word pairs or triplets
having identical unaccented Rheinische Dokumenta spellings, but different tonal or stress accents.
Also, other prosody
, such as the "melody" of sentence, which carries semantic information in many Rheinisch languages,http://www.archive.org/stream/grammatikderrip00mngoog#page/n18/mode/1up (Novembre, 5, 2009) is not preserved in Rheinische Dokumenta writing.
The "e̩" is a so-called schwa
.
There is no long version of "e̩".
Although a schwa usually cannot have the word accent, or stress, in some dialects there are exceptions. Words having only schwas do have their stresses on schwas, and they can receive the main stress within a sentence as well. The Colognian
word (in Rheinische Dokumenta writing) is an example.
There is another schwa. It does not have a corresponding grapheme in Rheinische Dokumenta. It could be noted in IPA as an unstressed short [ɔ̆], in some dialects and positions also as an unstressed short ɐ. Some publications call it a "vocalic r". It is almost always followed by a glottal stop
. Glottal stops are not noted in Rheinische Dokumenta, even though they are phoneme
s occasionally having minimal pair
s, and a length attribute. Since this Schwa almost always corresponds to the digraph "er" ending a word or a separable syllable prefix of Standard German orthography, most users of Rheinische Dokumenta positionally print "er", or "e̩r", respectively, for increased readability in an attempt of courtesy towards their readers who read German more fluently than Rheinische Dokumenta. From the standpoint of phonological writing, this is incorrect.
"e̩", there is a corresponding long vowel:
" would be spellt: "bǫi" in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are occasions, when two monophthongs need to be written together without forming a diphthong, that means, they are pronounced separately with either a glottal stop
or an intervocalic joiner consonant "j" in between. There is no written distinction between these cases, although it is not forbidden to write the character "j" for clarity. The number of diphthongs existing in a dialect is far less than each possible combination of two vowels, thus there are not very many ambiguities when taking syllable structuer into account.
Assimilation
and coarticulation
are predominant in most of the languages written using Rheinische Dokumenta, thus diphthong articulation
may deviate somewhat from the articulation of the isolated monophthongs. Also, depending on languages, the lengths of their diphthongs may vary considerably between the extremes of as short as a typical short monophthong to longer than the sum of two long monophthongs. Varying lengths of diphthongs are not noted in Rheinische Dokumenta, which at least does not create ambiguities within a dialect.
, they would be written in a manner analoguous to the diphthongs, using three adjacent letters of vocals.
, and Lower Franconian, rule of final obstruent devoicing
, voiced consonants can not, or hardly, appear at the end of a word or sentence. This is one of the major differences between Rheinische Dokumenta and Standard German writing, since Standard German orthography tries to keep word stems unaltered, even if pronunciation varies with suffixes, endings, or phonological rules
. If there is assimilation
, or other sandhi
, across word boundaries which yields a consonant voiced at a word end, some authors write them as contractions, or join the words with a dash
"-", so as to avoid having final voiced consonants.
rather than being a characteristic of a word, or a dialect, although that is not always so.
The letter eng
(
and small caps
print.
There is no distinction between the different phones represented by
s, actually, most often a specific dialect uses one, but not the other phone of a pair.
Both
The letter
Rhineland
Historically, the Rhinelands refers to a loosely-defined region embracing the land on either bank of the River Rhine in central Europe....
.
It was presented to the public in 1986 by the Landschaftsverband Rheinland.
It offers a uniform common notation of almost every phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
spoken in the Lower Rhine
Lower Rhine region (Germany)
The Lower Rhine region or Niederrhein is a region around the Lower Rhine section of the river Rhine in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany between approximately Neuss and Düsseldorf in the South and the Dutch border around Emmerich in the North...
area, the western and central Rhineland, the Berg region, the Westerwald
Westerwald
The Westerwald is a low mountain range on the right bank of the River Rhine in the German federal states of Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia. It is a part of the Rhine Massif...
, Eifel
Eifel
The Eifel is a low mountain range in western Germany and eastern Belgium. It occupies parts of southwestern North Rhine-Westphalia, northwestern Rhineland-Palatinate and the south of the German-speaking Community of Belgium....
, and Hunsrück
Hunsrück
The Hunsrück is a low mountain range in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It is bounded by the river valleys of the Moselle , the Nahe , and the Rhine . The Hunsrück is continued by the Taunus mountains on the eastern side of the Rhine. In the north behind the Moselle it is continued by the Eifel...
mountain regions, plus the areas surrounding the Nahe
Nahe
The Nahe River is a river in Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland, Germany, a left tributary to the Rhine. It has also given name to the wine region Nahe situated around it....
and Moselle River
Moselle River
The Moselle is a river flowing through France, Luxembourg, and Germany. It is a left tributary of the Rhine, joining the Rhine at Koblenz. A small part of Belgium is also drained by the Mosel through the Our....
s.
It encompasses the dialect
Dialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
s of cities such as
Aachen
Aachen
Aachen has historically been a spa town in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Aachen was a favoured residence of Charlemagne, and the place of coronation of the Kings of Germany. Geographically, Aachen is the westernmost town of Germany, located along its borders with Belgium and the Netherlands, ...
,
Bingen
Bingen am Rhein
Bingen am Rhein is a town in the Mainz-Bingen district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.The settlement’s original name was Bingium, a Celtic word that may have meant “hole in the rock”, a description of the shoal behind the Mäuseturm, known as the Binger Loch. Bingen was the starting point for the...
,
Bonn
Bonn
Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....
,
Cologne
Cologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
,
Duisburg
Duisburg
- History :A legend recorded by Johannes Aventinus holds that Duisburg, was built by the eponymous Tuisto, mythical progenitor of Germans, ca. 2395 BC...
,
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the...
,
Eschweiler (in Germany)
Eschweiler
Eschweiler is a municipality in the district of Aachen in North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany on the river Inde, near the German-Belgian-Dutch frontier, and about 15 km east of Aachen and 50 km west of Cologne.- History :...
,
Eschweiler (in Luxembourg)
Eschweiler, Luxembourg
Eschweiler is a commune and small town in northern Luxembourg. It is part of the canton of Wiltz, which is part of the district of Diekirch., the town of Eschweiler, which lies in the centre of the commune, has a population of 195. Other towns within the commune include Erpeldange and Knaphoscheid....
,
Essen
Essen
- Origin of the name :In German-speaking countries, the name of the city Essen often causes confusion as to its origins, because it is commonly known as the German infinitive of the verb for the act of eating, and/or the German noun for food. Although scholars still dispute the interpretation of...
,
Eupen
Eupen
Eupen is a municipality in the Belgian province of Liège, from the German border , from the Dutch border and from the "High Fens" nature reserve...
,
Gennep
Gennep
Gennep is a municipality and a city in the southeastern Netherlands.- Population centres :Aaldonk, Dam, De Looi, Diekendaal, Gennep, Heijen, Hekkens, Milsbeek, Ottersum, Smele, Ven-Zelderheide and Zelder.- The city of Gennep :...
,
Gummersbach
Gummersbach
Gummersbach is a city in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, being the district seat of the Oberbergischer Kreis. It is located 50 km east of Cologne. In the past it was nicknamed "the Lime Tree Town", because lime trees lined the main street...
,
Heinsberg
Heinsberg
Heinsberg is the capital of the district Heinsberg in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is situated near the border with the Netherlands, on the river Wurm, approx...
,
Karlsruhe
Karlsruhe
The City of Karlsruhe is a city in the southwest of Germany, in the state of Baden-Württemberg, located near the French-German border.Karlsruhe was founded in 1715 as Karlsruhe Palace, when Germany was a series of principalities and city states...
,
Kaiserslautern
Kaiserslautern
Kaiserslautern is a city in southwest Germany, located in the Bundesland of Rhineland-Palatinate at the edge of the Palatinate forest . The historic centre dates to the 9th century. It is from Paris, from Frankfurt am Main, and from Luxembourg.Kaiserslautern is home to 99,469 people...
,
Kerkrade
Kerkrade
Kerkrade is a town and a municipality in the southeastern Netherlands.It is the western half of the divided region and de facto city, taken together with the eastern half, the German town of Herzogenrath...
,
Cleves
Kleve
Kleve , is a town in the Lower Rhine region of northwestern Germany near the Dutch border and the River Rhine. From the 11th century onwards, Kleve was capital of a county and later a duchy...
,
Koblenz
Koblenz
Koblenz is a German city situated on both banks of the Rhine at its confluence with the Moselle, where the Deutsches Eck and its monument are situated.As Koblenz was one of the military posts established by Drusus about 8 BC, the...
,
Limburg
Limburg an der Lahn
Limburg an der Lahn is the district seat of Limburg-Weilburg in Hesse, Germany.-Location:Limburg lies in western Hesse between the Taunus and the Westerwald on the river Lahn....
,
Ludwigshafen
Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Ludwigshafen am Rhein is a city in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Ludwigshafen is located on the Rhine opposite Mannheim. Together with Mannheim, Heidelberg and the surrounding region, it forms the Rhine Neckar Area....
,
Luxembourg
Luxembourg (city)
The city of Luxembourg , also known as Luxembourg City , is a commune with city status, and the capital of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. It is located at the confluence of the Alzette and Pétrusse Rivers in southern Luxembourg...
,
Maastricht
Maastricht
Maastricht is situated on both sides of the Meuse river in the south-eastern part of the Netherlands, on the Belgian border and near the German border...
,
Mainz
Mainz
Mainz under the Holy Roman Empire, and previously was a Roman fort city which commanded the west bank of the Rhine and formed part of the northernmost frontier of the Roman Empire...
,
Malmedy
Malmedy
Malmedy is a municipality of Belgium. It lies in the country's Walloon Region, Province of Liège. It belongs to the French Community of Belgium, within which it is French-speaking with facilities for German-speakers. On January 1, 2006 Malmedy had a total population of 11,829...
,
Mönchengladbach
Mönchengladbach
Mönchengladbach , formerly known as Münchengladbach, is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located west of the Rhine half way between Düsseldorf and the Dutch border....
,
Nijmegen,
Oberhausen
Oberhausen
Oberhausen is a city on the river Emscher in the Ruhr Area, Germany, located between Duisburg and Essen . The city hosts the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and its Gasometer Oberhausen is an anchor point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage. It is also well known for the...
,
Prüm
Prüm
Prüm is a town in the Westeifel , Germany. Formerly a district capital, today it is the administrative seat of the Verbandsgemeinde Prüm.-Geography:...
,
Raeren
Raeren
Raeren is a municipality located in the Belgian province of Liège. It was part of Germany until the First World War, after which it became part of Belgium. It is one of several towns in Eastern Belgium which still predominantly speak German....
,
Saarbrücken
Saarbrücken
Saarbrücken is the capital of the state of Saarland in Germany. The city is situated at the heart of a metropolitan area that borders on the west on Dillingen and to the north-east on Neunkirchen, where most of the people of the Saarland live....
,
Siegen
Siegen
Siegen is a city in Germany, in the south Westphalian part of North Rhine-Westphalia.It is located in the district of Siegen-Wittgenstein in the Arnsberg region...
,
Trier
Trier
Trier, historically called in English Treves is a city in Germany on the banks of the Moselle. It is the oldest city in Germany, founded in or before 16 BC....
,
Venlo
Venlo
Venlo is a municipality and a city in the southeastern Netherlands, next to the German border. It is situated in the province of Limburg.In 2001, the municipalities of Belfeld and Tegelen were merged into the municipality of Venlo. Tegelen was originally part of the Duchy of Jülich centuries ago,...
,
St. Vith,
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden is a city in southwest Germany and the capital of the federal state of Hesse. It has about 275,400 inhabitants, plus approximately 10,000 United States citizens...
,
Wipperfürth
Wipperfürth
thumb|310px|Map of the citythumb|250px|Town hallWipperfürth is a municipality in the Oberbergischer Kreis of North Rhine-Westfalia, Germany, about 40 km north-east of Cologne, and the oldest town in the Bergischen Land.-History:...
,
Wuppertal
Wuppertal
Wuppertal is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located in and around the Wupper river valley, and is situated east of the city of Düsseldorf and south of the Ruhr area. With a population of approximately 350,000, it is the largest city in the Bergisches Land...
,
Xanten
Xanten
Xanten is a historic town in the North Rhine-Westphalia state of Germany, located in the district of Wesel.Xanten is known for the Archaeological Park or archaeological open air museum , its medieval picturesque city centre with Xanten Cathedral and many museums, its large man-made lake for...
,
and many more.
Rheinische Dokumenta was designed to be rather easily readable for dialect speakers educated in German writing, but there are some differences that make it quite distinct from the usual ways of writing the dialects: There is no doubling of consonants to mark short vowels, and there are extra diacritical marks. The German letters ⟨z⟩ and ⟨x⟩ are spelt out as ⟨ts⟩ and ⟨ks⟩, German ⟨ch⟩ is spelt ⟨k⟩ when it indicates a /k/ pronunciation, German ⟨qu⟩ is spelt ⟨kw⟩. These spellings appear in other Germanic languages as well, but Rhinelanders are generally not accustomed to it.
Letters
The Rheinische Dokumenta uses the lettersLetter (alphabet)
A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....
of today's basic Latin alphabet, without ⟨c⟩, ⟨q⟩, ⟨x⟩, ⟨y⟩, ⟨z⟩, though it has the digraphs
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
⟨ch⟩, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ng⟩, trigraph
Trigraph
A trigraph is a group of three symbols, most commonly letters.Trigraph can mean:-Computing:* Digraphs and trigraphs, groups of characters used to symbolise one character...
⟨sch⟩. In addition, the three common German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
Umlaut
Umlaut (diacritic)
The diaeresis and the umlaut are diacritics that consist of two dots placed over a letter, most commonly a vowel. When that letter is an i or a j, the diacritic replaces the tittle: ï....
ed letters are used: ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨ü⟩.
Each letter, digraph, or trigraph is strictly representing one phone.
Most letters represent the usual sounds for which they are used in the German alphabet
German alphabet
The modern German alphabet is an extended Latin alphabet consisting of 30 letters – the same letters that are found in the Basic modern Latin alphabet plus four extra letters.In German, the individual letters have neuter gender: das A, das B etc....
or, slightly less so, in the Dutch alphabet
Dutch alphabet
The modern Dutch alphabet consists of the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet and is used for the Dutch language. Five letters are vowels and 21 letters are consonants.- History :...
or that of the Luxembourgish language
Luxembourgish language
Luxembourgish is a High German language spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 320,000 people worldwide speak Luxembourgish.-Language family:...
. Several letters are ambiguous in these languages, such as voiced consonants which lose their voice when appearing at the end of a word. These ambiguities are avoided writing Rheinische Dokumenta; despite the fact that word stems may change their printed appearance, when declined
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
or conjugated
Grammatical conjugation
In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection . Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, or other grammatical categories...
, always the most phonetically correct letters, digraphs, or trigraphs are being used.
Digraph and trigraph unambiguity
As opposed to DutchDutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, the combination of ⟨s⟩ followed by ⟨ch⟩ does not occur in the languages for which Rheinische Dokumenta was made. Thus, since ⟨c⟩ is not otherwise used in Rheinische Dokumenta, both ⟨ch
Ch (digraph)
Ch is a digraph in the Roman alphabet and Uyghur. It is treated as a letter of its own in Chamorro, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Igbo, Quechua, Guarani, Welsh, Cornish, Breton and Belarusian Łacinka alphabets. In Vietnamese, it also used to be considered a letter for collation purposes but this is no...
⟩ and ⟨sch⟩ are unambiguous, especially the underlined letter combinations, and the ones having an arch below.
Only the digraph ⟨ng⟩ has some ambiguity. An ⟨n⟩ may occur at the end of a syllable
Syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
, but only a few dialects allow a syllable-initial after a syllable final ⟨n⟩. While ⟨ng⟩ at syllable joints is frequent in German, most languages that can use Rheinische Dokumenta have ⟨mg⟩ or ⟨nj⟩ instead in almost all instances. The Authors of Rheinische Dokumenta suggest using the single letter eng
Eng (letter)
Eng or engma is a letter of the Latin alphabet, used to represent a velar nasal in the written form of some languages and in the International Phonetic Alphabet.-History:...
⟨ŋ⟩ instead of the digraph ⟨ng⟩ when possible.
Letter case
Though not defined in the original specification, upper case letters can be used. While some authors do not use them at all, others start sentences with capitals, others also capitalise names, and few use capital initial letters on each substantive and nounNoun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
, as standard German
Standard German
Standard German is the standard variety of the German language used as a written language, in formal contexts, and for communication between different dialect areas...
writing does.
Accents
StressStress (linguistics)
In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...
, and the tonal accents, are usually ignored when writing in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are diacritics to indicate them, though, but since they are seen to considerably hamper readability, make prints ugly, and are hardly necessary to facilitate understanding, they are seldom used. Some dialects do not have tonal accents anyway. For the other ones, there are only very few word pairs or triplets
Minimal pair
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have distinct meanings...
having identical unaccented Rheinische Dokumenta spellings, but different tonal or stress accents.
Also, other prosody
Prosody (linguistics)
In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance ; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of...
, such as the "melody" of sentence, which carries semantic information in many Rheinisch languages,http://www.archive.org/stream/grammatikderrip00mngoog#page/n18/mode/1up (Novembre, 5, 2009) is not preserved in Rheinische Dokumenta writing.
Vowels
Vowels come in two variants, short and long. That many dialects feature three distinct vowel lengths is ignored, as doing so does not create any ambiguities and makes reading easier. Short vowels are represented by single letters, long vowels are represented by the same letters doubled to indicate lengthening.Short monophthongs
There are 14 short vowels in the languages that the script was designed for, 13 of which are representable in Rheinische Dokumenta:| Letter | IPA International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic... |
Sample Word | Rheinische Dokumenta | Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
A, a |
a, ɐ, ʌ | English "bud", "but", "butt": | bat | U+0041, U+0061 |
|
Ạ, ạ |
ɑ, ʌ | English "column": | kạle̩m | U+1EA0, U+1EA1 |
|
Ä, ä |
ɛ | English "where", "ware": | wäe̩ | U+00C4, U+00E4 |
|
Ą̈, ą̈ |
æ | English "batch": | bą̈tsch | ||
E, e |
e | English "bet": | bet | U+0045, U+0065 |
|
E̩, e̩ ə |
ə | English article "a" in casual speech: | e̩ | U+0045+0329, U+0065+0329U+0259 |
|
I, i |
i, ɪ | English "spit": | spit | U+0049, U+0069 |
|
O, o |
o, ʊ | French "Cologne KOLN KOLN, digital channel 10, is the CBS affiliate in Lincoln, Nebraska. It operates a satellite station, KGIN, on digital channel 11 in Grand Island. KGIN repeats all KOLN programming, but airs separate commercials... ": |
kolǫnje̩ | U+004F, U+006F |
|
Ǫ, ǫ |
ɔ | English word "off": | ǫf | U+01EA, U+01EB |
|
Ö, ö |
ø | Kölsch word "" (cutaway) | köt | U+00D6, U+00F6 |
|
Ǫ̈, ǫ̈ |
œ | German pronunciation of "Cologne Cologne Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the... ": "Köln": |
Kǫ̈ln | ||
U, u |
ʊ, u | English verb, to "put": | put | U+0055, U+0075 |
|
Ü, ü |
y, ʏ | French "" (street): | rü | U+00DC, U+00FC |
The "e̩" is a so-called schwa
Schwa
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean the following:*An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in some languages, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel...
.
There is no long version of "e̩".
Although a schwa usually cannot have the word accent, or stress, in some dialects there are exceptions. Words having only schwas do have their stresses on schwas, and they can receive the main stress within a sentence as well. The Colognian
Kölsch language
Kölsch is a very closely related small set of dialects, or variants, of the Ripuarian Central German group of languages. Kölsch is spoken in and partially around Cologne in the area covered by the Archdiocese and former Electorate of Cologne reaching from Neuss in the north to just south of Bonn,...
word (in Rheinische Dokumenta writing) is an example.
The schwa "e̩r"
There is another schwa. It does not have a corresponding grapheme in Rheinische Dokumenta. It could be noted in IPA as an unstressed short [ɔ̆], in some dialects and positions also as an unstressed short ɐ. Some publications call it a "vocalic r". It is almost always followed by a glottal stop
Glottal stop
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
. Glottal stops are not noted in Rheinische Dokumenta, even though they are phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s occasionally having minimal pair
Minimal pair
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have distinct meanings...
s, and a length attribute. Since this Schwa almost always corresponds to the digraph "er" ending a word or a separable syllable prefix of Standard German orthography, most users of Rheinische Dokumenta positionally print "er", or "e̩r", respectively, for increased readability in an attempt of courtesy towards their readers who read German more fluently than Rheinische Dokumenta. From the standpoint of phonological writing, this is incorrect.
Long monophthongs
There are 12 long vowels. For each short vowel with the exception of the schwaSchwa
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean the following:*An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in some languages, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel...
"e̩", there is a corresponding long vowel:
| Letter | IPA International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic... |
Sample Word | Rheinische Dokumenta | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Aa, aa |
a, ɐː, ʌː | Kölsch "Aap": | Aap | |
Ạạ, ạạ |
ɑː, ʌː | British English "Argument": | Ạạgjume̩nt | |
Ää, ää |
ɛː | Kölsch "Wääsh": | Vääsch | |
Ą̈ą̈, ą̈ą̈ |
æː | strong Southern Texas accent "Dad": | Dą̈ą̈t | |
Ee, ee |
eː | German "Esel" (donkey): | eeṣe̩l | |
Ii, ii |
iː, ɪː | English "speed": | spiit | |
| English "meal": | miil | |||
Oo, oo |
oː, ʊː | French "Eau de Cologne": | oode̩ kolǫnje̩ | |
Ǫǫ, ǫǫ |
ɔː | British English "door": | dǫǫ | |
Öö, öö |
øː | Horst Köhler Horst Köhler Horst Köhler is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union. He was President of Germany from 2004 to 2010. As the candidate of the two Christian Democratic sister parties, the CDU and the CSU, and the liberal FDP, Köhler was elected to his first five-year term by the Federal Assembly on... 's surname: |
Kööle̩r (see above remark on the digraph "e̩r") | |
Ǫ̈ǫ̈, ǫ̈ǫ̈ |
œː | English "stern": | stǫ̈ǫ̈n | |
| British English "burger": | bǫ̈ǫ̈ge̩ | |||
| English "colonel": | kǫ̈ǫ̈nl, kǫ̈ǫ̈ne̩l | |||
Uu, uu |
ʊː, uː | English "boot": | buut | |
Üü, üü |
yː, ʏː | Ruud Krol Ruud Krol Rudolf Jozef Krol is a retired Dutch footballer who was capped 83 times for his native country. Playing the vast majority of his career with his home town club of Ajax before traveling the world as both a player and a coach... 's first name: |
Rüüt |
Diphthongs
In Rheinische Dokumenta, Diphthongs are simply denoted as a sequence of the two monophthongs heard, and spoken jointly. For instance, the English word "boyBoy
A boy is a young male human , as contrasted to its female counterpart, girl, or an adult male, a man.The term "boy" is primarily used to indicate biological sex distinctions, cultural gender role distinctions or both...
" would be spellt: "bǫi" in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are occasions, when two monophthongs need to be written together without forming a diphthong, that means, they are pronounced separately with either a glottal stop
Glottal stop
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
or an intervocalic joiner consonant "j" in between. There is no written distinction between these cases, although it is not forbidden to write the character "j" for clarity. The number of diphthongs existing in a dialect is far less than each possible combination of two vowels, thus there are not very many ambiguities when taking syllable structuer into account.
Assimilation
Assimilation (linguistics)
Assimilation is a common phonological process by which the sound of the ending of one word blends into the sound of the beginning of the following word. This occurs when the parts of the mouth and vocal cords start to form the beginning sounds of the next word before the last sound has been...
and coarticulation
Coarticulation
Coarticulation in its general sense refers to a situation in which a conceptually isolated speech sound is influenced by, and becomes more like, a preceding or following speech sound...
are predominant in most of the languages written using Rheinische Dokumenta, thus diphthong articulation
Manner of articulation
In linguistics, manner of articulation describes how the tongue, lips, jaw, and other speech organs are involved in making a sound. Often the concept is only used for the production of consonants, even though the movement of the articulars will also greatly alter the resonant properties of the...
may deviate somewhat from the articulation of the isolated monophthongs. Also, depending on languages, the lengths of their diphthongs may vary considerably between the extremes of as short as a typical short monophthong to longer than the sum of two long monophthongs. Varying lengths of diphthongs are not noted in Rheinische Dokumenta, which at least does not create ambiguities within a dialect.
Other
There are no triphthongs, although diphthongs can be followed by schwas in some languages. If there were, for instance if Rheinische Dokumenta was used writing WestphalianWestphalian language
Westphalian is one of the major dialect groups of West Low German. Its most salient feature is the diphthongization . For example, speakers say iEten instead of Eːten for eat...
, they would be written in a manner analoguous to the diphthongs, using three adjacent letters of vocals.
The Rheinische Dokumenta is a phonetic writing system developed in the early 1980s by a working group of academics, linguists, local language experts, and local language speakers of the Rhineland
Rhineland
Historically, the Rhinelands refers to a loosely-defined region embracing the land on either bank of the River Rhine in central Europe....
.
It was presented to the public in 1986 by the Landschaftsverband Rheinland.
It offers a uniform common notation of almost every phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
spoken in the Lower Rhine
Lower Rhine region (Germany)
The Lower Rhine region or Niederrhein is a region around the Lower Rhine section of the river Rhine in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany between approximately Neuss and Düsseldorf in the South and the Dutch border around Emmerich in the North...
area, the western and central Rhineland, the Berg region, the Westerwald
Westerwald
The Westerwald is a low mountain range on the right bank of the River Rhine in the German federal states of Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia. It is a part of the Rhine Massif...
, Eifel
Eifel
The Eifel is a low mountain range in western Germany and eastern Belgium. It occupies parts of southwestern North Rhine-Westphalia, northwestern Rhineland-Palatinate and the south of the German-speaking Community of Belgium....
, and Hunsrück
Hunsrück
The Hunsrück is a low mountain range in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It is bounded by the river valleys of the Moselle , the Nahe , and the Rhine . The Hunsrück is continued by the Taunus mountains on the eastern side of the Rhine. In the north behind the Moselle it is continued by the Eifel...
mountain regions, plus the areas surrounding the Nahe
Nahe
The Nahe River is a river in Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland, Germany, a left tributary to the Rhine. It has also given name to the wine region Nahe situated around it....
and Moselle River
Moselle River
The Moselle is a river flowing through France, Luxembourg, and Germany. It is a left tributary of the Rhine, joining the Rhine at Koblenz. A small part of Belgium is also drained by the Mosel through the Our....
s.
It encompasses the dialect
Dialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
s of cities such as
Aachen
Aachen
Aachen has historically been a spa town in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Aachen was a favoured residence of Charlemagne, and the place of coronation of the Kings of Germany. Geographically, Aachen is the westernmost town of Germany, located along its borders with Belgium and the Netherlands, ...
,
Bingen
Bingen am Rhein
Bingen am Rhein is a town in the Mainz-Bingen district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.The settlement’s original name was Bingium, a Celtic word that may have meant “hole in the rock”, a description of the shoal behind the Mäuseturm, known as the Binger Loch. Bingen was the starting point for the...
,
Bonn
Bonn
Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....
,
Cologne
Cologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
,
Duisburg
Duisburg
- History :A legend recorded by Johannes Aventinus holds that Duisburg, was built by the eponymous Tuisto, mythical progenitor of Germans, ca. 2395 BC...
,
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the...
,
Eschweiler (in Germany)
Eschweiler
Eschweiler is a municipality in the district of Aachen in North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany on the river Inde, near the German-Belgian-Dutch frontier, and about 15 km east of Aachen and 50 km west of Cologne.- History :...
,
Eschweiler (in Luxembourg)
Eschweiler, Luxembourg
Eschweiler is a commune and small town in northern Luxembourg. It is part of the canton of Wiltz, which is part of the district of Diekirch., the town of Eschweiler, which lies in the centre of the commune, has a population of 195. Other towns within the commune include Erpeldange and Knaphoscheid....
,
Essen
Essen
- Origin of the name :In German-speaking countries, the name of the city Essen often causes confusion as to its origins, because it is commonly known as the German infinitive of the verb for the act of eating, and/or the German noun for food. Although scholars still dispute the interpretation of...
,
Eupen
Eupen
Eupen is a municipality in the Belgian province of Liège, from the German border , from the Dutch border and from the "High Fens" nature reserve...
,
Gennep
Gennep
Gennep is a municipality and a city in the southeastern Netherlands.- Population centres :Aaldonk, Dam, De Looi, Diekendaal, Gennep, Heijen, Hekkens, Milsbeek, Ottersum, Smele, Ven-Zelderheide and Zelder.- The city of Gennep :...
,
Gummersbach
Gummersbach
Gummersbach is a city in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, being the district seat of the Oberbergischer Kreis. It is located 50 km east of Cologne. In the past it was nicknamed "the Lime Tree Town", because lime trees lined the main street...
,
Heinsberg
Heinsberg
Heinsberg is the capital of the district Heinsberg in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is situated near the border with the Netherlands, on the river Wurm, approx...
,
Karlsruhe
Karlsruhe
The City of Karlsruhe is a city in the southwest of Germany, in the state of Baden-Württemberg, located near the French-German border.Karlsruhe was founded in 1715 as Karlsruhe Palace, when Germany was a series of principalities and city states...
,
Kaiserslautern
Kaiserslautern
Kaiserslautern is a city in southwest Germany, located in the Bundesland of Rhineland-Palatinate at the edge of the Palatinate forest . The historic centre dates to the 9th century. It is from Paris, from Frankfurt am Main, and from Luxembourg.Kaiserslautern is home to 99,469 people...
,
Kerkrade
Kerkrade
Kerkrade is a town and a municipality in the southeastern Netherlands.It is the western half of the divided region and de facto city, taken together with the eastern half, the German town of Herzogenrath...
,
Cleves
Kleve
Kleve , is a town in the Lower Rhine region of northwestern Germany near the Dutch border and the River Rhine. From the 11th century onwards, Kleve was capital of a county and later a duchy...
,
Koblenz
Koblenz
Koblenz is a German city situated on both banks of the Rhine at its confluence with the Moselle, where the Deutsches Eck and its monument are situated.As Koblenz was one of the military posts established by Drusus about 8 BC, the...
,
Limburg
Limburg an der Lahn
Limburg an der Lahn is the district seat of Limburg-Weilburg in Hesse, Germany.-Location:Limburg lies in western Hesse between the Taunus and the Westerwald on the river Lahn....
,
Ludwigshafen
Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Ludwigshafen am Rhein is a city in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Ludwigshafen is located on the Rhine opposite Mannheim. Together with Mannheim, Heidelberg and the surrounding region, it forms the Rhine Neckar Area....
,
Luxembourg
Luxembourg (city)
The city of Luxembourg , also known as Luxembourg City , is a commune with city status, and the capital of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. It is located at the confluence of the Alzette and Pétrusse Rivers in southern Luxembourg...
,
Maastricht
Maastricht
Maastricht is situated on both sides of the Meuse river in the south-eastern part of the Netherlands, on the Belgian border and near the German border...
,
Mainz
Mainz
Mainz under the Holy Roman Empire, and previously was a Roman fort city which commanded the west bank of the Rhine and formed part of the northernmost frontier of the Roman Empire...
,
Malmedy
Malmedy
Malmedy is a municipality of Belgium. It lies in the country's Walloon Region, Province of Liège. It belongs to the French Community of Belgium, within which it is French-speaking with facilities for German-speakers. On January 1, 2006 Malmedy had a total population of 11,829...
,
Mönchengladbach
Mönchengladbach
Mönchengladbach , formerly known as Münchengladbach, is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located west of the Rhine half way between Düsseldorf and the Dutch border....
,
Nijmegen,
Oberhausen
Oberhausen
Oberhausen is a city on the river Emscher in the Ruhr Area, Germany, located between Duisburg and Essen . The city hosts the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and its Gasometer Oberhausen is an anchor point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage. It is also well known for the...
,
Prüm
Prüm
Prüm is a town in the Westeifel , Germany. Formerly a district capital, today it is the administrative seat of the Verbandsgemeinde Prüm.-Geography:...
,
Raeren
Raeren
Raeren is a municipality located in the Belgian province of Liège. It was part of Germany until the First World War, after which it became part of Belgium. It is one of several towns in Eastern Belgium which still predominantly speak German....
,
Saarbrücken
Saarbrücken
Saarbrücken is the capital of the state of Saarland in Germany. The city is situated at the heart of a metropolitan area that borders on the west on Dillingen and to the north-east on Neunkirchen, where most of the people of the Saarland live....
,
Siegen
Siegen
Siegen is a city in Germany, in the south Westphalian part of North Rhine-Westphalia.It is located in the district of Siegen-Wittgenstein in the Arnsberg region...
,
Trier
Trier
Trier, historically called in English Treves is a city in Germany on the banks of the Moselle. It is the oldest city in Germany, founded in or before 16 BC....
,
Venlo
Venlo
Venlo is a municipality and a city in the southeastern Netherlands, next to the German border. It is situated in the province of Limburg.In 2001, the municipalities of Belfeld and Tegelen were merged into the municipality of Venlo. Tegelen was originally part of the Duchy of Jülich centuries ago,...
,
St. Vith,
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden is a city in southwest Germany and the capital of the federal state of Hesse. It has about 275,400 inhabitants, plus approximately 10,000 United States citizens...
,
Wipperfürth
Wipperfürth
thumb|310px|Map of the citythumb|250px|Town hallWipperfürth is a municipality in the Oberbergischer Kreis of North Rhine-Westfalia, Germany, about 40 km north-east of Cologne, and the oldest town in the Bergischen Land.-History:...
,
Wuppertal
Wuppertal
Wuppertal is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located in and around the Wupper river valley, and is situated east of the city of Düsseldorf and south of the Ruhr area. With a population of approximately 350,000, it is the largest city in the Bergisches Land...
,
Xanten
Xanten
Xanten is a historic town in the North Rhine-Westphalia state of Germany, located in the district of Wesel.Xanten is known for the Archaeological Park or archaeological open air museum , its medieval picturesque city centre with Xanten Cathedral and many museums, its large man-made lake for...
,
and many more.
Rheinische Dokumenta was designed to be rather easily readable for dialect speakers educated in German writing, but there are some differences that make it quite distinct from the usual ways of writing the dialects: There is no doubling of consonants to mark short vowels, and there are extra diacritical marks. The German letters ⟨z⟩ and ⟨x⟩ are spelt out as ⟨ts⟩ and ⟨ks⟩, German ⟨ch⟩ is spelt ⟨k⟩ when it indicates a /k/ pronunciation, German ⟨qu⟩ is spelt ⟨kw⟩. These spellings appear in other Germanic languages as well, but Rhinelanders are generally not accustomed to it.
Letters
The Rheinische Dokumenta uses the lettersLetter (alphabet)
A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....
of today's basic Latin alphabet, without ⟨c⟩, ⟨q⟩, ⟨x⟩, ⟨y⟩, ⟨z⟩, though it has the digraphs
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
⟨ch⟩, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ng⟩, trigraph
Trigraph
A trigraph is a group of three symbols, most commonly letters.Trigraph can mean:-Computing:* Digraphs and trigraphs, groups of characters used to symbolise one character...
⟨sch⟩. In addition, the three common German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
Umlaut
Umlaut (diacritic)
The diaeresis and the umlaut are diacritics that consist of two dots placed over a letter, most commonly a vowel. When that letter is an i or a j, the diacritic replaces the tittle: ï....
ed letters are used: ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨ü⟩.
Each letter, digraph, or trigraph is strictly representing one phone.
Most letters represent the usual sounds for which they are used in the German alphabet
German alphabet
The modern German alphabet is an extended Latin alphabet consisting of 30 letters – the same letters that are found in the Basic modern Latin alphabet plus four extra letters.In German, the individual letters have neuter gender: das A, das B etc....
or, slightly less so, in the Dutch alphabet
Dutch alphabet
The modern Dutch alphabet consists of the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet and is used for the Dutch language. Five letters are vowels and 21 letters are consonants.- History :...
or that of the Luxembourgish language
Luxembourgish language
Luxembourgish is a High German language spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 320,000 people worldwide speak Luxembourgish.-Language family:...
. Several letters are ambiguous in these languages, such as voiced consonants which lose their voice when appearing at the end of a word. These ambiguities are avoided writing Rheinische Dokumenta; despite the fact that word stems may change their printed appearance, when declined
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
or conjugated
Grammatical conjugation
In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection . Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, or other grammatical categories...
, always the most phonetically correct letters, digraphs, or trigraphs are being used.
Digraph and trigraph unambiguity
As opposed to DutchDutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, the combination of ⟨s⟩ followed by ⟨ch⟩ does not occur in the languages for which Rheinische Dokumenta was made. Thus, since ⟨c⟩ is not otherwise used in Rheinische Dokumenta, both ⟨ch
Ch (digraph)
Ch is a digraph in the Roman alphabet and Uyghur. It is treated as a letter of its own in Chamorro, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Igbo, Quechua, Guarani, Welsh, Cornish, Breton and Belarusian Łacinka alphabets. In Vietnamese, it also used to be considered a letter for collation purposes but this is no...
⟩ and ⟨sch⟩ are unambiguous, especially the underlined letter combinations, and the ones having an arch below.
Only the digraph ⟨ng⟩ has some ambiguity. An ⟨n⟩ may occur at the end of a syllable
Syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
, but only a few dialects allow a syllable-initial after a syllable final ⟨n⟩. While ⟨ng⟩ at syllable joints is frequent in German, most languages that can use Rheinische Dokumenta have ⟨mg⟩ or ⟨nj⟩ instead in almost all instances. The Authors of Rheinische Dokumenta suggest using the single letter eng
Eng (letter)
Eng or engma is a letter of the Latin alphabet, used to represent a velar nasal in the written form of some languages and in the International Phonetic Alphabet.-History:...
⟨ŋ⟩ instead of the digraph ⟨ng⟩ when possible.
Letter case
Though not defined in the original specification, upper case letters can be used. While some authors do not use them at all, others start sentences with capitals, others also capitalise names, and few use capital initial letters on each substantive and nounNoun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
, as standard German
Standard German
Standard German is the standard variety of the German language used as a written language, in formal contexts, and for communication between different dialect areas...
writing does.
Accents
StressStress (linguistics)
In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...
, and the tonal accents, are usually ignored when writing in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are diacritics to indicate them, though, but since they are seen to considerably hamper readability, make prints ugly, and are hardly necessary to facilitate understanding, they are seldom used. Some dialects do not have tonal accents anyway. For the other ones, there are only very few word pairs or triplets
Minimal pair
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have distinct meanings...
having identical unaccented Rheinische Dokumenta spellings, but different tonal or stress accents.
Also, other prosody
Prosody (linguistics)
In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance ; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of...
, such as the "melody" of sentence, which carries semantic information in many Rheinisch languages,http://www.archive.org/stream/grammatikderrip00mngoog#page/n18/mode/1up (Novembre, 5, 2009) is not preserved in Rheinische Dokumenta writing.
Vowels
Vowels come in two variants, short and long. That many dialects feature three distinct vowel lengths is ignored, as doing so does not create any ambiguities and makes reading easier. Short vowels are represented by single letters, long vowels are represented by the same letters doubled to indicate lengthening.Short monophthongs
There are 14 short vowels in the languages that the script was designed for, 13 of which are representable in Rheinische Dokumenta:| Letter | IPA International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic... |
Sample Word | Rheinische Dokumenta | Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
A, a |
a, ɐ, ʌ | English "bud", "but", "butt": | bat | U+0041, U+0061 |
|
Ạ, ạ |
ɑ, ʌ | English "column": | kạle̩m | U+1EA0, U+1EA1 |
|
Ä, ä |
ɛ | English "where", "ware": | wäe̩ | U+00C4, U+00E4 |
|
Ą̈, ą̈ |
æ | English "batch": | bą̈tsch | ||
E, e |
e | English "bet": | bet | U+0045, U+0065 |
|
E̩, e̩ ə |
ə | English article "a" in casual speech: | e̩ | U+0045+0329, U+0065+0329U+0259 |
|
I, i |
i, ɪ | English "spit": | spit | U+0049, U+0069 |
|
O, o |
o, ʊ | French "Cologne KOLN KOLN, digital channel 10, is the CBS affiliate in Lincoln, Nebraska. It operates a satellite station, KGIN, on digital channel 11 in Grand Island. KGIN repeats all KOLN programming, but airs separate commercials... ": |
kolǫnje̩ | U+004F, U+006F |
|
Ǫ, ǫ |
ɔ | English word "off": | ǫf | U+01EA, U+01EB |
|
Ö, ö |
ø | Kölsch word "" (cutaway) | köt | U+00D6, U+00F6 |
|
Ǫ̈, ǫ̈ |
œ | German pronunciation of "Cologne Cologne Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the... ": "Köln": |
Kǫ̈ln | ||
U, u |
ʊ, u | English verb, to "put": | put | U+0055, U+0075 |
|
Ü, ü |
y, ʏ | French "" (street): | rü | U+00DC, U+00FC |
The "e̩" is a so-called schwa
Schwa
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean the following:*An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in some languages, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel...
.
There is no long version of "e̩".
Although a schwa usually cannot have the word accent, or stress, in some dialects there are exceptions. Words having only schwas do have their stresses on schwas, and they can receive the main stress within a sentence as well. The Colognian
Kölsch language
Kölsch is a very closely related small set of dialects, or variants, of the Ripuarian Central German group of languages. Kölsch is spoken in and partially around Cologne in the area covered by the Archdiocese and former Electorate of Cologne reaching from Neuss in the north to just south of Bonn,...
word (in Rheinische Dokumenta writing) is an example.
The schwa "e̩r"
There is another schwa. It does not have a corresponding grapheme in Rheinische Dokumenta. It could be noted in IPA as an unstressed short [ɔ̆], in some dialects and positions also as an unstressed short ɐ. Some publications call it a "vocalic r". It is almost always followed by a glottal stop
Glottal stop
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
. Glottal stops are not noted in Rheinische Dokumenta, even though they are phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s occasionally having minimal pair
Minimal pair
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have distinct meanings...
s, and a length attribute. Since this Schwa almost always corresponds to the digraph "er" ending a word or a separable syllable prefix of Standard German orthography, most users of Rheinische Dokumenta positionally print "er", or "e̩r", respectively, for increased readability in an attempt of courtesy towards their readers who read German more fluently than Rheinische Dokumenta. From the standpoint of phonological writing, this is incorrect.
Long monophthongs
There are 12 long vowels. For each short vowel with the exception of the schwaSchwa
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean the following:*An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in some languages, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel...
"e̩", there is a corresponding long vowel:
| Letter | IPA International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic... |
Sample Word | Rheinische Dokumenta | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Aa, aa |
a, ɐː, ʌː | Kölsch "Aap": | Aap | |
Ạạ, ạạ |
ɑː, ʌː | British English "Argument": | Ạạgjume̩nt | |
Ää, ää |
ɛː | Kölsch "Wääsh": | Vääsch | |
Ą̈ą̈, ą̈ą̈ |
æː | strong Southern Texas accent "Dad": | Dą̈ą̈t | |
Ee, ee |
eː | German "Esel" (donkey): | eeṣe̩l | |
Ii, ii |
iː, ɪː | English "speed": | spiit | |
| English "meal": | miil | |||
Oo, oo |
oː, ʊː | French "Eau de Cologne": | oode̩ kolǫnje̩ | |
Ǫǫ, ǫǫ |
ɔː | British English "door": | dǫǫ | |
Öö, öö |
øː | Horst Köhler Horst Köhler Horst Köhler is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union. He was President of Germany from 2004 to 2010. As the candidate of the two Christian Democratic sister parties, the CDU and the CSU, and the liberal FDP, Köhler was elected to his first five-year term by the Federal Assembly on... 's surname: |
Kööle̩r (see above remark on the digraph "e̩r") | |
Ǫ̈ǫ̈, ǫ̈ǫ̈ |
œː | English "stern": | stǫ̈ǫ̈n | |
| British English "burger": | bǫ̈ǫ̈ge̩ | |||
| English "colonel": | kǫ̈ǫ̈nl, kǫ̈ǫ̈ne̩l | |||
Uu, uu |
ʊː, uː | English "boot": | buut | |
Üü, üü |
yː, ʏː | Ruud Krol Ruud Krol Rudolf Jozef Krol is a retired Dutch footballer who was capped 83 times for his native country. Playing the vast majority of his career with his home town club of Ajax before traveling the world as both a player and a coach... 's first name: |
Rüüt |
Diphthongs
In Rheinische Dokumenta, Diphthongs are simply denoted as a sequence of the two monophthongs heard, and spoken jointly. For instance, the English word "boyBoy
A boy is a young male human , as contrasted to its female counterpart, girl, or an adult male, a man.The term "boy" is primarily used to indicate biological sex distinctions, cultural gender role distinctions or both...
" would be spellt: "bǫi" in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are occasions, when two monophthongs need to be written together without forming a diphthong, that means, they are pronounced separately with either a glottal stop
Glottal stop
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
or an intervocalic joiner consonant "j" in between. There is no written distinction between these cases, although it is not forbidden to write the character "j" for clarity. The number of diphthongs existing in a dialect is far less than each possible combination of two vowels, thus there are not very many ambiguities when taking syllable structuer into account.
Assimilation
Assimilation (linguistics)
Assimilation is a common phonological process by which the sound of the ending of one word blends into the sound of the beginning of the following word. This occurs when the parts of the mouth and vocal cords start to form the beginning sounds of the next word before the last sound has been...
and coarticulation
Coarticulation
Coarticulation in its general sense refers to a situation in which a conceptually isolated speech sound is influenced by, and becomes more like, a preceding or following speech sound...
are predominant in most of the languages written using Rheinische Dokumenta, thus diphthong articulation
Manner of articulation
In linguistics, manner of articulation describes how the tongue, lips, jaw, and other speech organs are involved in making a sound. Often the concept is only used for the production of consonants, even though the movement of the articulars will also greatly alter the resonant properties of the...
may deviate somewhat from the articulation of the isolated monophthongs. Also, depending on languages, the lengths of their diphthongs may vary considerably between the extremes of as short as a typical short monophthong to longer than the sum of two long monophthongs. Varying lengths of diphthongs are not noted in Rheinische Dokumenta, which at least does not create ambiguities within a dialect.
Other
There are no triphthongs, although diphthongs can be followed by schwas in some languages. If there were, for instance if Rheinische Dokumenta was used writing WestphalianWestphalian language
Westphalian is one of the major dialect groups of West Low German. Its most salient feature is the diphthongization . For example, speakers say iEten instead of Eːten for eat...
, they would be written in a manner analoguous to the diphthongs, using three adjacent letters of vocals.
The Rheinische Dokumenta is a phonetic writing system developed in the early 1980s by a working group of academics, linguists, local language experts, and local language speakers of the Rhineland
Rhineland
Historically, the Rhinelands refers to a loosely-defined region embracing the land on either bank of the River Rhine in central Europe....
.
It was presented to the public in 1986 by the Landschaftsverband Rheinland.
It offers a uniform common notation of almost every phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
spoken in the Lower Rhine
Lower Rhine region (Germany)
The Lower Rhine region or Niederrhein is a region around the Lower Rhine section of the river Rhine in North-Rhine Westphalia, Germany between approximately Neuss and Düsseldorf in the South and the Dutch border around Emmerich in the North...
area, the western and central Rhineland, the Berg region, the Westerwald
Westerwald
The Westerwald is a low mountain range on the right bank of the River Rhine in the German federal states of Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse and North Rhine-Westphalia. It is a part of the Rhine Massif...
, Eifel
Eifel
The Eifel is a low mountain range in western Germany and eastern Belgium. It occupies parts of southwestern North Rhine-Westphalia, northwestern Rhineland-Palatinate and the south of the German-speaking Community of Belgium....
, and Hunsrück
Hunsrück
The Hunsrück is a low mountain range in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It is bounded by the river valleys of the Moselle , the Nahe , and the Rhine . The Hunsrück is continued by the Taunus mountains on the eastern side of the Rhine. In the north behind the Moselle it is continued by the Eifel...
mountain regions, plus the areas surrounding the Nahe
Nahe
The Nahe River is a river in Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland, Germany, a left tributary to the Rhine. It has also given name to the wine region Nahe situated around it....
and Moselle River
Moselle River
The Moselle is a river flowing through France, Luxembourg, and Germany. It is a left tributary of the Rhine, joining the Rhine at Koblenz. A small part of Belgium is also drained by the Mosel through the Our....
s.
It encompasses the dialect
Dialect
The term dialect is used in two distinct ways, even by linguists. One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular group of the language's speakers. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect may also be defined by other factors,...
s of cities such as
Aachen
Aachen
Aachen has historically been a spa town in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Aachen was a favoured residence of Charlemagne, and the place of coronation of the Kings of Germany. Geographically, Aachen is the westernmost town of Germany, located along its borders with Belgium and the Netherlands, ...
,
Bingen
Bingen am Rhein
Bingen am Rhein is a town in the Mainz-Bingen district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.The settlement’s original name was Bingium, a Celtic word that may have meant “hole in the rock”, a description of the shoal behind the Mäuseturm, known as the Binger Loch. Bingen was the starting point for the...
,
Bonn
Bonn
Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....
,
Cologne
Cologne
Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the...
,
Duisburg
Duisburg
- History :A legend recorded by Johannes Aventinus holds that Duisburg, was built by the eponymous Tuisto, mythical progenitor of Germans, ca. 2395 BC...
,
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the...
,
Eschweiler (in Germany)
Eschweiler
Eschweiler is a municipality in the district of Aachen in North Rhine-Westphalia in Germany on the river Inde, near the German-Belgian-Dutch frontier, and about 15 km east of Aachen and 50 km west of Cologne.- History :...
,
Eschweiler (in Luxembourg)
Eschweiler, Luxembourg
Eschweiler is a commune and small town in northern Luxembourg. It is part of the canton of Wiltz, which is part of the district of Diekirch., the town of Eschweiler, which lies in the centre of the commune, has a population of 195. Other towns within the commune include Erpeldange and Knaphoscheid....
,
Essen
Essen
- Origin of the name :In German-speaking countries, the name of the city Essen often causes confusion as to its origins, because it is commonly known as the German infinitive of the verb for the act of eating, and/or the German noun for food. Although scholars still dispute the interpretation of...
,
Eupen
Eupen
Eupen is a municipality in the Belgian province of Liège, from the German border , from the Dutch border and from the "High Fens" nature reserve...
,
Gennep
Gennep
Gennep is a municipality and a city in the southeastern Netherlands.- Population centres :Aaldonk, Dam, De Looi, Diekendaal, Gennep, Heijen, Hekkens, Milsbeek, Ottersum, Smele, Ven-Zelderheide and Zelder.- The city of Gennep :...
,
Gummersbach
Gummersbach
Gummersbach is a city in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, being the district seat of the Oberbergischer Kreis. It is located 50 km east of Cologne. In the past it was nicknamed "the Lime Tree Town", because lime trees lined the main street...
,
Heinsberg
Heinsberg
Heinsberg is the capital of the district Heinsberg in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is situated near the border with the Netherlands, on the river Wurm, approx...
,
Karlsruhe
Karlsruhe
The City of Karlsruhe is a city in the southwest of Germany, in the state of Baden-Württemberg, located near the French-German border.Karlsruhe was founded in 1715 as Karlsruhe Palace, when Germany was a series of principalities and city states...
,
Kaiserslautern
Kaiserslautern
Kaiserslautern is a city in southwest Germany, located in the Bundesland of Rhineland-Palatinate at the edge of the Palatinate forest . The historic centre dates to the 9th century. It is from Paris, from Frankfurt am Main, and from Luxembourg.Kaiserslautern is home to 99,469 people...
,
Kerkrade
Kerkrade
Kerkrade is a town and a municipality in the southeastern Netherlands.It is the western half of the divided region and de facto city, taken together with the eastern half, the German town of Herzogenrath...
,
Cleves
Kleve
Kleve , is a town in the Lower Rhine region of northwestern Germany near the Dutch border and the River Rhine. From the 11th century onwards, Kleve was capital of a county and later a duchy...
,
Koblenz
Koblenz
Koblenz is a German city situated on both banks of the Rhine at its confluence with the Moselle, where the Deutsches Eck and its monument are situated.As Koblenz was one of the military posts established by Drusus about 8 BC, the...
,
Limburg
Limburg an der Lahn
Limburg an der Lahn is the district seat of Limburg-Weilburg in Hesse, Germany.-Location:Limburg lies in western Hesse between the Taunus and the Westerwald on the river Lahn....
,
Ludwigshafen
Ludwigshafen am Rhein
Ludwigshafen am Rhein is a city in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Ludwigshafen is located on the Rhine opposite Mannheim. Together with Mannheim, Heidelberg and the surrounding region, it forms the Rhine Neckar Area....
,
Luxembourg
Luxembourg (city)
The city of Luxembourg , also known as Luxembourg City , is a commune with city status, and the capital of the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. It is located at the confluence of the Alzette and Pétrusse Rivers in southern Luxembourg...
,
Maastricht
Maastricht
Maastricht is situated on both sides of the Meuse river in the south-eastern part of the Netherlands, on the Belgian border and near the German border...
,
Mainz
Mainz
Mainz under the Holy Roman Empire, and previously was a Roman fort city which commanded the west bank of the Rhine and formed part of the northernmost frontier of the Roman Empire...
,
Malmedy
Malmedy
Malmedy is a municipality of Belgium. It lies in the country's Walloon Region, Province of Liège. It belongs to the French Community of Belgium, within which it is French-speaking with facilities for German-speakers. On January 1, 2006 Malmedy had a total population of 11,829...
,
Mönchengladbach
Mönchengladbach
Mönchengladbach , formerly known as Münchengladbach, is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located west of the Rhine half way between Düsseldorf and the Dutch border....
,
Nijmegen,
Oberhausen
Oberhausen
Oberhausen is a city on the river Emscher in the Ruhr Area, Germany, located between Duisburg and Essen . The city hosts the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen and its Gasometer Oberhausen is an anchor point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage. It is also well known for the...
,
Prüm
Prüm
Prüm is a town in the Westeifel , Germany. Formerly a district capital, today it is the administrative seat of the Verbandsgemeinde Prüm.-Geography:...
,
Raeren
Raeren
Raeren is a municipality located in the Belgian province of Liège. It was part of Germany until the First World War, after which it became part of Belgium. It is one of several towns in Eastern Belgium which still predominantly speak German....
,
Saarbrücken
Saarbrücken
Saarbrücken is the capital of the state of Saarland in Germany. The city is situated at the heart of a metropolitan area that borders on the west on Dillingen and to the north-east on Neunkirchen, where most of the people of the Saarland live....
,
Siegen
Siegen
Siegen is a city in Germany, in the south Westphalian part of North Rhine-Westphalia.It is located in the district of Siegen-Wittgenstein in the Arnsberg region...
,
Trier
Trier
Trier, historically called in English Treves is a city in Germany on the banks of the Moselle. It is the oldest city in Germany, founded in or before 16 BC....
,
Venlo
Venlo
Venlo is a municipality and a city in the southeastern Netherlands, next to the German border. It is situated in the province of Limburg.In 2001, the municipalities of Belfeld and Tegelen were merged into the municipality of Venlo. Tegelen was originally part of the Duchy of Jülich centuries ago,...
,
St. Vith,
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden is a city in southwest Germany and the capital of the federal state of Hesse. It has about 275,400 inhabitants, plus approximately 10,000 United States citizens...
,
Wipperfürth
Wipperfürth
thumb|310px|Map of the citythumb|250px|Town hallWipperfürth is a municipality in the Oberbergischer Kreis of North Rhine-Westfalia, Germany, about 40 km north-east of Cologne, and the oldest town in the Bergischen Land.-History:...
,
Wuppertal
Wuppertal
Wuppertal is a city in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is located in and around the Wupper river valley, and is situated east of the city of Düsseldorf and south of the Ruhr area. With a population of approximately 350,000, it is the largest city in the Bergisches Land...
,
Xanten
Xanten
Xanten is a historic town in the North Rhine-Westphalia state of Germany, located in the district of Wesel.Xanten is known for the Archaeological Park or archaeological open air museum , its medieval picturesque city centre with Xanten Cathedral and many museums, its large man-made lake for...
,
and many more.
Rheinische Dokumenta was designed to be rather easily readable for dialect speakers educated in German writing, but there are some differences that make it quite distinct from the usual ways of writing the dialects: There is no doubling of consonants to mark short vowels, and there are extra diacritical marks. The German letters ⟨z⟩ and ⟨x⟩ are spelt out as ⟨ts⟩ and ⟨ks⟩, German ⟨ch⟩ is spelt ⟨k⟩ when it indicates a /k/ pronunciation, German ⟨qu⟩ is spelt ⟨kw⟩. These spellings appear in other Germanic languages as well, but Rhinelanders are generally not accustomed to it.
Letters
The Rheinische Dokumenta uses the lettersLetter (alphabet)
A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....
of today's basic Latin alphabet, without ⟨c⟩, ⟨q⟩, ⟨x⟩, ⟨y⟩, ⟨z⟩, though it has the digraphs
Digraph (orthography)
A digraph or digram is a pair of characters used to write one phoneme or a sequence of phonemes that does not correspond to the normal values of the two characters combined...
⟨ch⟩, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ng⟩, trigraph
Trigraph
A trigraph is a group of three symbols, most commonly letters.Trigraph can mean:-Computing:* Digraphs and trigraphs, groups of characters used to symbolise one character...
⟨sch⟩. In addition, the three common German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
Umlaut
Umlaut (diacritic)
The diaeresis and the umlaut are diacritics that consist of two dots placed over a letter, most commonly a vowel. When that letter is an i or a j, the diacritic replaces the tittle: ï....
ed letters are used: ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨ü⟩.
Each letter, digraph, or trigraph is strictly representing one phone.
Most letters represent the usual sounds for which they are used in the German alphabet
German alphabet
The modern German alphabet is an extended Latin alphabet consisting of 30 letters – the same letters that are found in the Basic modern Latin alphabet plus four extra letters.In German, the individual letters have neuter gender: das A, das B etc....
or, slightly less so, in the Dutch alphabet
Dutch alphabet
The modern Dutch alphabet consists of the 26 letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet and is used for the Dutch language. Five letters are vowels and 21 letters are consonants.- History :...
or that of the Luxembourgish language
Luxembourgish language
Luxembourgish is a High German language spoken mainly in Luxembourg. About 320,000 people worldwide speak Luxembourgish.-Language family:...
. Several letters are ambiguous in these languages, such as voiced consonants which lose their voice when appearing at the end of a word. These ambiguities are avoided writing Rheinische Dokumenta; despite the fact that word stems may change their printed appearance, when declined
Declension
In linguistics, declension is the inflection of nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and articles to indicate number , case , and gender...
or conjugated
Grammatical conjugation
In linguistics, conjugation is the creation of derived forms of a verb from its principal parts by inflection . Conjugation may be affected by person, number, gender, tense, aspect, mood, voice, or other grammatical categories...
, always the most phonetically correct letters, digraphs, or trigraphs are being used.
Digraph and trigraph unambiguity
As opposed to DutchDutch language
Dutch is a West Germanic language and the native language of the majority of the population of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Suriname, the three member states of the Dutch Language Union. Most speakers live in the European Union, where it is a first language for about 23 million and a second...
, the combination of ⟨s⟩ followed by ⟨ch⟩ does not occur in the languages for which Rheinische Dokumenta was made. Thus, since ⟨c⟩ is not otherwise used in Rheinische Dokumenta, both ⟨ch
Ch (digraph)
Ch is a digraph in the Roman alphabet and Uyghur. It is treated as a letter of its own in Chamorro, Czech, Slovak, Polish, Igbo, Quechua, Guarani, Welsh, Cornish, Breton and Belarusian Łacinka alphabets. In Vietnamese, it also used to be considered a letter for collation purposes but this is no...
⟩ and ⟨sch⟩ are unambiguous, especially the underlined letter combinations, and the ones having an arch below.
Only the digraph ⟨ng⟩ has some ambiguity. An ⟨n⟩ may occur at the end of a syllable
Syllable
A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...
, but only a few dialects allow a syllable-initial after a syllable final ⟨n⟩. While ⟨ng⟩ at syllable joints is frequent in German, most languages that can use Rheinische Dokumenta have ⟨mg⟩ or ⟨nj⟩ instead in almost all instances. The Authors of Rheinische Dokumenta suggest using the single letter eng
Eng (letter)
Eng or engma is a letter of the Latin alphabet, used to represent a velar nasal in the written form of some languages and in the International Phonetic Alphabet.-History:...
⟨ŋ⟩ instead of the digraph ⟨ng⟩ when possible.
Letter case
Though not defined in the original specification, upper case letters can be used. While some authors do not use them at all, others start sentences with capitals, others also capitalise names, and few use capital initial letters on each substantive and nounNoun
In linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition .Lexical categories are defined in terms of how their members combine with other kinds of...
, as standard German
Standard German
Standard German is the standard variety of the German language used as a written language, in formal contexts, and for communication between different dialect areas...
writing does.
Accents
StressStress (linguistics)
In linguistics, stress is the relative emphasis that may be given to certain syllables in a word, or to certain words in a phrase or sentence. The term is also used for similar patterns of phonetic prominence inside syllables. The word accent is sometimes also used with this sense.The stress placed...
, and the tonal accents, are usually ignored when writing in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are diacritics to indicate them, though, but since they are seen to considerably hamper readability, make prints ugly, and are hardly necessary to facilitate understanding, they are seldom used. Some dialects do not have tonal accents anyway. For the other ones, there are only very few word pairs or triplets
Minimal pair
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have distinct meanings...
having identical unaccented Rheinische Dokumenta spellings, but different tonal or stress accents.
Also, other prosody
Prosody (linguistics)
In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance ; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of...
, such as the "melody" of sentence, which carries semantic information in many Rheinisch languages,http://www.archive.org/stream/grammatikderrip00mngoog#page/n18/mode/1up (Novembre, 5, 2009) is not preserved in Rheinische Dokumenta writing.
Vowels
Vowels come in two variants, short and long. That many dialects feature three distinct vowel lengths is ignored, as doing so does not create any ambiguities and makes reading easier. Short vowels are represented by single letters, long vowels are represented by the same letters doubled to indicate lengthening.Short monophthongs
There are 14 short vowels in the languages that the script was designed for, 13 of which are representable in Rheinische Dokumenta:| Letter | IPA International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic... |
Sample Word | Rheinische Dokumenta | Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
A, a |
a, ɐ, ʌ | English "bud", "but", "butt": | bat | U+0041, U+0061 |
|
Ạ, ạ |
ɑ, ʌ | English "column": | kạle̩m | U+1EA0, U+1EA1 |
|
Ä, ä |
ɛ | English "where", "ware": | wäe̩ | U+00C4, U+00E4 |
|
Ą̈, ą̈ |
æ | English "batch": | bą̈tsch | ||
E, e |
e | English "bet": | bet | U+0045, U+0065 |
|
E̩, e̩ ə |
ə | English article "a" in casual speech: | e̩ | U+0045+0329, U+0065+0329U+0259 |
|
I, i |
i, ɪ | English "spit": | spit | U+0049, U+0069 |
|
O, o |
o, ʊ | French "Cologne KOLN KOLN, digital channel 10, is the CBS affiliate in Lincoln, Nebraska. It operates a satellite station, KGIN, on digital channel 11 in Grand Island. KGIN repeats all KOLN programming, but airs separate commercials... ": |
kolǫnje̩ | U+004F, U+006F |
|
Ǫ, ǫ |
ɔ | English word "off": | ǫf | U+01EA, U+01EB |
|
Ö, ö |
ø | Kölsch word "" (cutaway) | köt | U+00D6, U+00F6 |
|
Ǫ̈, ǫ̈ |
œ | German pronunciation of "Cologne Cologne Cologne is Germany's fourth-largest city , and is the largest city both in the Germany Federal State of North Rhine-Westphalia and within the Rhine-Ruhr Metropolitan Area, one of the major European metropolitan areas with more than ten million inhabitants.Cologne is located on both sides of the... ": "Köln": |
Kǫ̈ln | ||
U, u |
ʊ, u | English verb, to "put": | put | U+0055, U+0075 |
|
Ü, ü |
y, ʏ | French "" (street): | rü | U+00DC, U+00FC |
The "e̩" is a so-called schwa
Schwa
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean the following:*An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in some languages, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel...
.
There is no long version of "e̩".
Although a schwa usually cannot have the word accent, or stress, in some dialects there are exceptions. Words having only schwas do have their stresses on schwas, and they can receive the main stress within a sentence as well. The Colognian
Kölsch language
Kölsch is a very closely related small set of dialects, or variants, of the Ripuarian Central German group of languages. Kölsch is spoken in and partially around Cologne in the area covered by the Archdiocese and former Electorate of Cologne reaching from Neuss in the north to just south of Bonn,...
word (in Rheinische Dokumenta writing) is an example.
The schwa "e̩r"
There is another schwa. It does not have a corresponding grapheme in Rheinische Dokumenta. It could be noted in IPA as an unstressed short [ɔ̆], in some dialects and positions also as an unstressed short ɐ. Some publications call it a "vocalic r". It is almost always followed by a glottal stop
Glottal stop
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
. Glottal stops are not noted in Rheinische Dokumenta, even though they are phoneme
Phoneme
In a language or dialect, a phoneme is the smallest segmental unit of sound employed to form meaningful contrasts between utterances....
s occasionally having minimal pair
Minimal pair
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, which differ in only one phonological element, such as a phone, phoneme, toneme or chroneme and have distinct meanings...
s, and a length attribute. Since this Schwa almost always corresponds to the digraph "er" ending a word or a separable syllable prefix of Standard German orthography, most users of Rheinische Dokumenta positionally print "er", or "e̩r", respectively, for increased readability in an attempt of courtesy towards their readers who read German more fluently than Rheinische Dokumenta. From the standpoint of phonological writing, this is incorrect.
Long monophthongs
There are 12 long vowels. For each short vowel with the exception of the schwaSchwa
In linguistics, specifically phonetics and phonology, schwa can mean the following:*An unstressed and toneless neutral vowel sound in some languages, often but not necessarily a mid-central vowel...
"e̩", there is a corresponding long vowel:
| Letter | IPA International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet "The acronym 'IPA' strictly refers [...] to the 'International Phonetic Association'. But it is now such a common practice to use the acronym also to refer to the alphabet itself that resistance seems pedantic... |
Sample Word | Rheinische Dokumenta | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Aa, aa |
a, ɐː, ʌː | Kölsch "Aap": | Aap | |
Ạạ, ạạ |
ɑː, ʌː | British English "Argument": | Ạạgjume̩nt | |
Ää, ää |
ɛː | Kölsch "Wääsh": | Vääsch | |
Ą̈ą̈, ą̈ą̈ |
æː | strong Southern Texas accent "Dad": | Dą̈ą̈t | |
Ee, ee |
eː | German "Esel" (donkey): | eeṣe̩l | |
Ii, ii |
iː, ɪː | English "speed": | spiit | |
| English "meal": | miil | |||
Oo, oo |
oː, ʊː | French "Eau de Cologne": | oode̩ kolǫnje̩ | |
Ǫǫ, ǫǫ |
ɔː | British English "door": | dǫǫ | |
Öö, öö |
øː | Horst Köhler Horst Köhler Horst Köhler is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union. He was President of Germany from 2004 to 2010. As the candidate of the two Christian Democratic sister parties, the CDU and the CSU, and the liberal FDP, Köhler was elected to his first five-year term by the Federal Assembly on... 's surname: |
Kööle̩r (see above remark on the digraph "e̩r") | |
Ǫ̈ǫ̈, ǫ̈ǫ̈ |
œː | English "stern": | stǫ̈ǫ̈n | |
| British English "burger": | bǫ̈ǫ̈ge̩ | |||
| English "colonel": | kǫ̈ǫ̈nl, kǫ̈ǫ̈ne̩l | |||
Uu, uu |
ʊː, uː | English "boot": | buut | |
Üü, üü |
yː, ʏː | Ruud Krol Ruud Krol Rudolf Jozef Krol is a retired Dutch footballer who was capped 83 times for his native country. Playing the vast majority of his career with his home town club of Ajax before traveling the world as both a player and a coach... 's first name: |
Rüüt |
Diphthongs
In Rheinische Dokumenta, Diphthongs are simply denoted as a sequence of the two monophthongs heard, and spoken jointly. For instance, the English word "boyBoy
A boy is a young male human , as contrasted to its female counterpart, girl, or an adult male, a man.The term "boy" is primarily used to indicate biological sex distinctions, cultural gender role distinctions or both...
" would be spellt: "bǫi" in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are occasions, when two monophthongs need to be written together without forming a diphthong, that means, they are pronounced separately with either a glottal stop
Glottal stop
The glottal stop, or more fully, the voiceless glottal plosive, is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages. In English, the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe or [[ʻokina]] in Hawaii among those using a preservative pronunciation of...
or an intervocalic joiner consonant "j" in between. There is no written distinction between these cases, although it is not forbidden to write the character "j" for clarity. The number of diphthongs existing in a dialect is far less than each possible combination of two vowels, thus there are not very many ambiguities when taking syllable structuer into account.
Assimilation
Assimilation (linguistics)
Assimilation is a common phonological process by which the sound of the ending of one word blends into the sound of the beginning of the following word. This occurs when the parts of the mouth and vocal cords start to form the beginning sounds of the next word before the last sound has been...
and coarticulation
Coarticulation
Coarticulation in its general sense refers to a situation in which a conceptually isolated speech sound is influenced by, and becomes more like, a preceding or following speech sound...
are predominant in most of the languages written using Rheinische Dokumenta, thus diphthong articulation
Manner of articulation
In linguistics, manner of articulation describes how the tongue, lips, jaw, and other speech organs are involved in making a sound. Often the concept is only used for the production of consonants, even though the movement of the articulars will also greatly alter the resonant properties of the...
may deviate somewhat from the articulation of the isolated monophthongs. Also, depending on languages, the lengths of their diphthongs may vary considerably between the extremes of as short as a typical short monophthong to longer than the sum of two long monophthongs. Varying lengths of diphthongs are not noted in Rheinische Dokumenta, which at least does not create ambiguities within a dialect.
Other
There are no triphthongs, although diphthongs can be followed by schwas in some languages. If there were, for instance if Rheinische Dokumenta was used writing WestphalianWestphalian language
Westphalian is one of the major dialect groups of West Low German. Its most salient feature is the diphthongization . For example, speakers say iEten instead of Eːten for eat...
, they would be written in a manner analoguous to the diphthongs, using three adjacent letters of vocals.
Consonants
Since most dialects follow the GermanGerman language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, and Lower Franconian, rule of final obstruent devoicing
Final obstruent devoicing
Final obstruent devoicing or terminal devoicing is a systematic phonological process occurring in languages such as German, Dutch, Polish, and Russian, among others...
, voiced consonants can not, or hardly, appear at the end of a word or sentence. This is one of the major differences between Rheinische Dokumenta and Standard German writing, since Standard German orthography tries to keep word stems unaltered, even if pronunciation varies with suffixes, endings, or phonological rules
Phonology
Phonology is, broadly speaking, the subdiscipline of linguistics concerned with the sounds of language. That is, it is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use...
. If there is assimilation
Assimilation (linguistics)
Assimilation is a common phonological process by which the sound of the ending of one word blends into the sound of the beginning of the following word. This occurs when the parts of the mouth and vocal cords start to form the beginning sounds of the next word before the last sound has been...
, or other sandhi
Sandhi
Sandhi is a cover term for a wide variety of phonological processes that occur at morpheme or word boundaries . Examples include the fusion of sounds across word boundaries and the alteration of sounds due to neighboring sounds or due to the grammatical function of adjacent words...
, across word boundaries which yields a consonant voiced at a word end, some authors write them as contractions, or join the words with a dash
Dash
A dash is one of several kinds of punctuation mark. Dashes appear similar to hyphens, but differ from them primarily in length, and serve different functions. The most common versions of the dash are the en dash and the em dash .-Common dashes:...
"-", so as to avoid having final voiced consonants.
Unvoiced plosives
| Letter | IPA | Sample Word | Rheinische Dokumenta | Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
P, p |
[p] | English "pitch": | pitsch | U+0050, U+0070 |
|
T, t |
[t] | English "tell": | täl | U+0054, U+0074 |
|
K, k |
[k] | New England American English "colt": | kǫlt | U+004B, U+006B |
Voiced plosives
| Letter | IPA | Sample Word | Rheinische Dokumenta | Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|
B, b |
[b] | English "bee": | bii | U+0042, U+0062 |
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D, d |
[d] | English "dull": | dal | U+0044, U+0064 |
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G, g |
[ɡ] | English "guts": | gats | U+0047, U+0067 |
Nasals
Though some dialects vary the durations of nasal consonants considerably, they are not doubled to indicate extended lengths when written, while vocals are. Though this does never create ambiguities within a language, comparison of languages is less supported. A good argument against doubling is, that often nasal durations are depending on speaker, style of speech, and prosodyProsody (linguistics)
In linguistics, prosody is the rhythm, stress, and intonation of speech. Prosody may reflect various features of the speaker or the utterance: the emotional state of the speaker; the form of the utterance ; the presence of irony or sarcasm; emphasis, contrast, and focus; or other elements of...
rather than being a characteristic of a word, or a dialect, although that is not always so.
| Letter | IPA | Sample Word | Rheinische Dokumenta | Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
M, m |
[m] | English "moon": | muun | U+004D, U+006D |
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N, n |
[n] | English "new": | njuu | U+004E, U+006E |
|
NG, ngŊ, ŋ |
[ŋ] | English "long": | lǫng | U+004E+0047, U+006E+0067U+014B, U+014A |
The letter eng
Eng (letter)
Eng or engma is a letter of the Latin alphabet, used to represent a velar nasal in the written form of some languages and in the International Phonetic Alphabet.-History:...
(
ŋ) is recommended to be used rather than the ng digraph when technically feasible. This recommendation is not always followed in an attempt to create prints closer resembling Standard German or Dutch. Though the phoneme cannot appear at the beginning of a syllable, upper case glyphs exist for all capsAll caps
In typography, all caps refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters. All caps is usually used for emphasis. It is commonly seen in the titles on book covers, in advertisements and in newspaper headlines...
and small caps
Small caps
In typography, small capitals are uppercase characters set at the same height and weight as surrounding lowercase letters or text figures...
print.
Liquids or aproximants
Some dialects vary the durations of liquids sometimes. With the exception of Ripuarian dialects, this is hardly a characteristic of words, but prosodic, it is not noted when writing Rheinische Dokumenta.| Letter | IPA | Sample Word | Rheinische Dokumenta | Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
L, l |
l, ʎ | English "law": | lǫǫ | U+004C, U+006C |
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R, r |
ʁ, ʀ | French "" (street): | rüü | U+0052, U+0072 |
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Ṙ, ṙ |
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Ṛ, ṛ |
U+0052+0323, U+0072+0323 |
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W, w |
w, β | English "wall": | wǫǫl | U+0057, U+0077 |
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H, h |
h | English "hell": | häl | U+0048, U+0068 |
There is no distinction between the different phones represented by
l, and r. They are nearly allophoneAllophone
In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds used to pronounce a single phoneme. For example, and are allophones for the phoneme in the English language...
s, actually, most often a specific dialect uses one, but not the other phone of a pair.
Both
ṛ, and ṙ, are rarely used since these sounds occur in few dialects only.Voiced fricatives
| Letter | IPA | Sample Word | Rheinische Dokumenta | Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
V, v |
v | English "vice": | vais | U+0076, U+0056 |
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Ṣ, ṣ Z, z |
z | English "zeal": | ṣiil | U+0053+0323, U+0073+0323U+005A, U+007A |
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| sch with arc below | ʒ | English "jet": | dschät | —, — |
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J, j |
ʝ | English "yet": | jät | U+004A, U+006A |
|
| c͜h | ɣ | Dutch "goet" (good): | c͜huut | U+0063+035C+0068 |
The letter
z is recommended to be used as a replacement of ṣ, when ṣ is technically not available. This resembles the use of z in Dutch writing.Unvoiced fricatives
| Letter | IPA | Sample Word | Rheinische Dokumenta | Unicode Unicode Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems... |
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F, f |
f | English "fish": | fisch | U+0066, U+0046 |
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S, s |
s | English "sick": | sik | U+0053, U+0073 |
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