Mika Graphemes and Phonemes

The developing language Mika has letters and sounds.

Some Big Words

Letters are among the graphemes, as are digits. A grapheme is the name of the various ways that a character can be drawn, the allographs. The sounds of a language are the phonemes, which, in general, can be represented by several phones depending on the context. The phones are specific articulations. Those several phones are called allophones. The grapheme is said to spell the phoneme. (The change at the end of a question is not considered among allophones.)

The relationship between graphemes and phonemes has a name: grapheme–phoneme correspondence (GPC), the bread-and-butter term in reading research and orthography studies. A grapheme that has such a relationship is a phonogram; other graphemes (such as digits) are called logograms. A writing system where one grapheme maps to one phoneme and vice versa is called a transparent or shallow orthography (Finnish, to a large degree; Spanish closely). To a mathematician, this is a bijective relationship, one-to-one and onto. The opposite of transparent is opaque or deep (English, with its many-to-many mess).

Marriage

Graphemes (specifically phonograms, letters) and phonemes (sounds) of Mika are connected in a special way. They are married and that marriage is a thing. The GPC is transparent.

What does it mean for the marriage to be a thing? Well, one can say, "Mika g extends below the baseline and is voiced". In Mika the word ogu would be used to refer to the marriage g.

There is no bigamy in Mika. To linguists this means no digraphs, no homographies, no polyphonies. The grapheme can express itself in many ways and the phoneme expresses itself in one way, but tolerant listeners will accept other phones. The letter and the sound are faithful.

This can be illustrated graphically like this:

The grapheme is designated with the < > brackets. The phoneme is shown with the / / brackets. The single allophone is shown with the [ ] brackets. Here we see that both forms of g, hook and eye glasses, mean the same letter. The phoneme and phone use IPA notation and so have a hook, though I think most people would understand both forms. The dotted green line refers to the tolerance of listeners; some sounds are close enough.

The Marriages

Here are the couples in Mika:

In most cases the symbol for the phoneme and the phone looks the same as the grapheme. There are three exceptions.

As mentioned above, the phoneme of g and its phone should use a hook.

Note that <y> is married to /j/. That j is sometimes called yod to avoid confusion with the sound in English "joy". Think about English "yes" and German "ja".

IPA notation uses variants of a to represent distinct sounds. There is only one way to "properly" say a.

Tolerance

Mika has a notion of hearing tolerance. It is built into the Mika culture.

The hearer often accepts nearby phones for a phoneme as though they are allophones. That is, a Mika speaker might be able to listen to speech by a noob and understand. Some speakers might speak with a weird accent (as you or I might) and many who know Mika will understand. And we might whisper or talk with mouths half full.

This is a gift from hearers to speakers. This should not be taken for granted. This tolerance takes brain power, and it thus weakens comprehension and consideration. If you want to talk with people of a different world view with Mika, then strive for a good Mika pronunciation. The person with a different world view might be confused with how you use words; there is no need to add more weights to the conversation.

This is aided by the built-in redundancy in Mika. The stumbling in hearing can be repaired. The repair might be triggered with Mika dialog interjections.

So, for some listeners...