Romic alphabet

The Romic Alphabet, sometimes known as the Romic Reform, is a phonetic alphabet proposed by Henry Sweet. It descends from Ellis's Palaeotype alphabet and English Phonotypic Alphabet, and is the direct ancestor of the International Phonetic Alphabet. In Romic every sound had a dedicated symbol, and every symbol represented a single sound. There were no capital letters; there were letters derived from small capitals, though these were distinct letters.

There were two variants, Broad Romic and Narrow Romic. Narrow Romic utilized italics to distinguish fine details of pronunciation; Broad Romic was cruder, and in it the vowels had their English "short" sounds when written singly, and their "long" sounds when doubled:

If the beginner has once learnt to pronounce a, e, i, o, u, as in glass, bet, bit, not, dull, he simply has to remember that long vowels are doubled, as in biit—"beat", and fuul—"fool", and diphthongs formed by the juxtaposition of their elements, as in boi—"boy" and hai—"high" [...]

Sweet adopted from Ellis and earlier philologists a method creating new letters by rotating existing ones, as in this way no new type would need to be cast:

There is, however, one simple method of forming new letters without casting new types, which is very often convenient. This is by turning the letters, thus - ə, ɔ. These new letters are perfectly distinct in shape, and are easily written. The ə was first employed by Schmeller to denote the final e-sound in the German gabe, &c. Mr. Ellis, in his ‘Palæotype,’ uses it to denote the allied English sound in but.

— Henry Sweet, A Handbook of Phonetics, 1877, p. 175

The IPA letter ⟨ɔ⟩ acquired its modern pronunciation and first use with this alphabet. He resurrected three Anglo-Saxon letters, ash ⟨æ⟩, eth ⟨ð⟩ and thorn ⟨þ⟩, the first two of which had the pronunciations they retain in the IPA.^{[citation needed][these may have been used earlier]}

Tables[]

Consonants[]

The consonants were as follows by 1892:^[1]

⟨ñ ᵹ ɹ λ ꞁ⟩ were eventually replaced with ⟨ɲ ɣ ʕ ʎ ʟ⟩ in the IPA.^[2] Apart from Sweet's use of italic h for voicelessness, the rest of the alphabet continues intact in the modern IPA.

Vowels[]

The vowels were as follows by 1892.^[1]

In "wide" vowels, the tongue is described as relaxed and flattened; in "narrow", it is tense and more convex. This corresponds to descriptions of vowels as lax and tense. Lax vowels are indicated by italic type. In the case of the mid back unrounded vowel ⟨a⟩, the description of its place of articulation does not accord well with some of the words given as examples. Sweet described vowels as narrowed with the tongue raised as in high vowels, but the jaw open as in low vowels. This conflicts with the presentation of the IPA, in which high and close are synonymous, as are low and open. Other than the back unrounded vowels and the value of ⟨ə⟩ for IPA [ø] (but also for English bird, in broad notation), Sweet's notation is essentially that of the IPA.

Italic a takes its traditional shape, which would later be made distinct in the IPA. That is, italic a was ⟨ɑ⟩, and italic ɐ, ⟨ɒ⟩. Long vowels are written double. Nasal vowels with an italic nasal consonant letter, such as ⟨a