Part of Bridgian Phonetics documentation.

This page details all the symbols in the syllabic form of Bridgian Phonetics. Tables are synthesised from data in the Translator, as of 2025-03-08. (This includes SVG paths from baseFont, allowed sequences, and punctuative characters.)

Three glyphs – the prophone, mesophone (with exophones), and metaphone – are arranged vertically to represent a single syllable. This is technically known as a “syllabograph”, although (phonic) ‘character’ and ‘letter’ work just as well, so long as its syllabic nature is made clear.

NOTE: The new Bridgian letters f, f́, ȷ, and ȷ́ have not yet been defined in syllabic form. The glyph for h́ has been deprecated following these changes.

Rules

It is assumed that syllabic-form text will comply with regular Phonetical rules. Any traditional string of such Phonetics can be converted into syllabic form – often, though, in multiple ways. (See the note on isophony in the aforementioned rules documentation.)

The prophone and metaphone must consist of one or two consonants, whereas the mesophone and exophones must have one vowel each. Once this limit has been reached, the current “phase” of the conversion will move to the next part. In the Translator, the phases are labelled thus:

0. First prophone → skips to 2 if vowel found
1. Second prophone → increments to 2 if vowel found
2. Left exophone → increments to 3 if mesophonic vowel found or consonant after exophone
3. Mesophone → raises an error (!) if consonant found
4. Right exophone → increments to 5 if consonant found; ends syllable if vowel found
5. First metaphone → ends syllable if vowel found
6. Second metaphone → ends syllable

On syllable-breaks (see next section), the phase is reset to zero and the syllable is appended to the converted list. Unused sounds are padded with empty elements, represented as SyllRepr.NULL in the Translator.

Syllable-breaks

• After a prophonic fricative if preceded by a click and before a consonant, or before another fricative, or before two consecutive consonants.
• C*S | *F | *SS
• After the mesophone if succeeded by a mesophonic vowel, or by an exophone followed by a mesophonic vowel or an exophone and a consonant.
• *M | *EM | *EES
• After the exophone if succeeded by a vowel.
• *V
• After any metaphonic consonant (or exophone) followed by a vowel, or a fricative not succeeded by another fricative.
• *V | *FO

Symbols used for simplified analysis: * = current character, C = click, E = exophone, F = fricative, M = mesophonic vowel, L = ‘l’, O = not fricative, S = consonant, V = vowel

For more details on the syllable-delimitation algorithm, see the Translator’s Bridgian.syllConv() method, which converts traditional-form Phonetical representations into syllabic-form ones. Hope you can speak good – or rather, bad – Python…

Alphabet

Punctuation

Merged glyphs

The fact that sounds’ symbols can be combined into a single one means that there are many more than listed above. This table lists all possible phonic (i.e., spoken; non-punctuative) glyphs, along with their SVG path-data in the Translator’s default font.

Note: “symphonic” glyphs can be used in both the prophone and metaphone.

Yindeldà

(Bridgian for ‘quantification’, singular or plural.)

• Total number of phonic glyphs: 367
• Options for prophone: 155, including null string
• Options for mesophone: 170
• Options for metaphone: 58, including null string
• Vowel-containing syllables: 155×170×58 = 1,528,300
• Non-mesophonic prophones: 40
• Number of distinct syllables: 1,528,340