Dualities
Of aspriates:
- p = bh
- t = dh
- k = gh
Of fricatives:
- v ≈ f
- z ≈ s
- j ≈ c
- þ ≈ ð
Of nasal clickss:
- m ≈ b
- n ≈ d
- ɔ ≈ g
Part of Bridgian Phonetics documentation.
Bridgian Phonetics began life as a part of a “random name generator” that the Devious One was working on in December 2023. It needed to know which sounds were possible for a syllable – this was achieved in the most boring way, a simple list of possible consonants and vowels.
The generator also needed to show the intended pronunciation, along with a (poorly) anglicised spelling; thence was born the Phonetical system. The old symbols section lists the exact letters used in the name-generator’s sound-representations.
This would also appear in an index of Bridgian place-names, with a few alterations, in January 2024 – the changes are shown as the “later version”.
Of aspriates:
Of fricatives:
Of nasal clickss:
Bridgian Phonetics began being called as such in February 2024, with great updates being made to the system.
These improvements initially consisted of the simplification of vowels with two standardisations:
Later, though, more sophisticated findings would be made, such as the “duality of the clicks”: that the sounds formerly represented as p, t, and k were, in effect, variants of b, d, and g respectively.
Also known was that the nasal consonants (m, n, and ɔ) corresponded in a similar way, although this was not – and still is not – used in any meaningful way, except for the letters appearing in the same places in the syllabic grids.
Short-form Phonetics was developed around this point, mainly as a reaction against the hard-to-read text outputted by the sounds bh, dh, and gh.
Around this point, short-form Phonetics was developed as a reaction aganist the hard to read text outputed by the sounds bh, dh, and gh.
It succeeded somewhat in its goals, converting those letters to p, t, and k, respectively, but failing when fricatives were preceded by clicks. (Shortenings such as ð̀ and ĉ were used – the accent representing which click went before.)
It was eventually renamed and heavily updated with anglicised form Phonetics, which more accurately captured the nuances of English spelling while still keeping ambiguity to a minimum. Short-form was also criticised for using non-Latin characters, such as ð and ǝ; these were removed with anglicisation, being represented by th and ù respectively.
But even after all this, there was more to do. The first was the classification of long consonants, culminating in the “duality of voicing”, as shown on the right.
The second was the removal of the dot from the letter i, to make writing easier (the letters f and j were unincorporated for the same reason). The third, and final, change was the alteration of the accents used in vowel-representation – there would now be only one vowel used: ´, for long vowels.
There were also more changes to short-form, with shortenings being additioned to long consonants preceded by b or g, rather than just d. (The vowel shortenings were changed so as to incorporate the long-vowel accents: still ¯, kept from earlier versions.)
In November 2024, in preparation for the year’s Bridgian Convention (or simply “BridgeCon”), the Devious One teamed up with one of his equally devious friends to invent a truly Bridgian writing-system. What they came up with was a way of using lines on 3×4 grids to encode strings of traditional-form Phonetics.
The full details can be found on the old syllabic form page – this system being known as such because multiple sounds could be represented on a single grid. (As mentioned on that page, though, the grid-and-lines system is not strictly syllabic, as some syllables could not be expressed without breaking the rules of non-intersection.)
Anglicised form came soon later – on the 26th, if this Website’s updates are anything to go by – along with the old “anglicisor” program. This can still be downloaded here, running in Python. However, a newer version of anglicised-form Phonetics is packaged with the Translator.
The upgrade to the Translator was required because the grid-system of Phonetics was replaced by true syllabic form in early March 2025. This uses three glyphs to represent over 1.5 million syllables – see yindeldà on the symbols page – and is represented as Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) elements to aid in reversability. (The Translator, of course, does not reverse syllabic-form Phonetical text, mainly because of its capability for multiple fonts.)
This section shows the lists of symbols used in old versions of Bridgian Phonetics. See the separate Symbols page for information on the current ones used.
All symbols are shown with their represented sound, written using modern symbols. (These are shown as: former symbol / current symbol.)
Vowels:
Consonants:
Capital letters were used to indicate stress patterns, alongside syllable-hyphens.
Vowels:
These could gain the accents ˆ or ¯ for short or long respectively.
Consonants:
(Also included was the pause, '.)
This is as copied from the early Phonetics documentation; translate into modern Phonetics using the key above.
Aspirates:
Hard fricatives:
Vowels:
Alphabet
Vowel-overview:
Vowel-replacements:
Consonant-overview:
Consonant-replacements: