Report of the Mikrusian alphabet 1 Introduction People of Earth speak in different languages. There are several hundreds of various languages. Each language is characterized by its own specific set of sounds and by a peculiarity of their articulation. However, there are people that regard their native languages as same ones, live in distant regions, and articulate equal-sense words with some difference. And the difference may be only in a point that some sounds are articulated with a moderate difference. The typical example is a situation with German language natives in different regions of Europe. In spite of this, these people communicate with each other without problems in understanding and they kick the articulation distinction to «accent», «dialect», «patois», or another term. Furthermore, there exist people that articulate individual sounds slightly in a different way in comparison with other “same-language” inhabitants of the same region. Usually this is classified by speech therapists as a speech defect. But this does not lead to problems in understanding such humans “with defect”. This is connected with the following: each listener identifies all “similar” sounds for himself. Our brain acts analogously when it analyzes all sounds in speech. The brain identifies sounds that belong to a certain range; it consider them as equal, as “equivalent”. 1.1 Classification subproblems In spite of such variety of languages, the variety of speech sounds is stipulated and bounded by possibilities of a human vocal apparatus. It has approximately the same possibilities in speech for all people (with rare exceptions of pathologies). The question arises: is it possible to classify sounds that a human vocal apparatus can generate in speech? As for any classification problem, one should solve the following subproblems. First, mark out all more or less different sounds. For this purpose, one should carry out the research for a great number of languages of world’s nationalities and should study what sounds a human is able to articulate in speech and what sounds a human is able to distinguish. An attempt of solution of such problem was done in constructing the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). Second, choose so-called equivalence classes among the collected sounds, i.e., decide what sounds we will regard as equal, as equivalent. It turns out that this is not a trivial problem, since different nationalities have different equalizations. For example, in some languages short and prolonged sounds are distinguished, i.e., the sense of a word may depend on the duration of one component sound. And in some languages such division is absent, i.e., a word with a protractedly articulated sound and a word with the same shortly articulated sound are regarded as the same word. There is a liberty in choosing the equivalence classes: we may enlarge or divide classes. What should guide us in this action? The answer is given by the following subproblem: we should be guided by the structure. Third, find a structure of the set of the considered sounds. In strict sense, we should search for a structure not of sounds’ set, rather of the earlier chosen equivalence classes. For example, it can be such that the studied set has a certain “natural” order. Or it is possible to find a certain periodicity in sounds’ structure. Fourth, move off “superfluous” sounds from the consideration and add “forgotten” sounds which were not included in the consideration yet. This operation is actual, especially for the considered problem, since a human doesn’t articulate all possible sounds in speech. Some vocal apparatus possibilities are applied for singing, crying, exclamations. We want but to classify sounds that one may apply in speech for an information transfer. About adding some forgotten sounds: the conclusion, on what should be added, can be made only after an analysis of the constructed structure. Also, it might happen that some classes should be united into one, according to the structure. Mendeleyev’s (D. I. Mendeleev) periodic table of chemical elements is the indicative example of a classification problem solution. We now briefly describe what operations were carried out for the listed subproblems. 1) The set of all known different atoms is the classification object. Here, the term “different” has the following sense: atoms are said to be different if there is any difference in their 1 physical and chemical properties. 2) Isotopes are the equivalence classes. In other words, atoms are said to be equivalent if their nuclei have equal electric charge. (It follows from this definition that nuclear mass and a number of electrons in the atom have no significance for the classification.) Each such class of atoms was called a chemical element. 3) Everybody knows the structure of chemical elements. It is the “periodic system of elements”. However later, it was discovered that there is no periodicity. But the structure of periods and groups in the table remained; in the modified state though. Nowadays, there are two almost equal versions of the structure presentation: http://environmentalchemistry.com/yogi/periodic/ and http://acswebcontent.acs.org/games/pt.html . 4) The structure of chemical elements, introduced by D. I. Mendeleyev, and an analysis of their atomic mass allowed to predict the existence of elements unknown at that time and some of their physical properties. Concerning the moving off “superfluous” elements: these facts have not entered in the history of the table creation (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_periodic_table). In this case, a substance may be considered to be superfluous if initially it was falsely thought as one that consists of a unique sort of atoms. Or substances such that the theory of their existence is refused — phlogiston, caloric substance. 1.2 Why do we need it? Creation of the Mikrusian [mık'rusıən] alphabet was imposed by several reasons and aims. 1) Necessity of putting in order the knowledge about the sounds in human speech. There were attempts of such classification before but an ordered structure wasn’t constructed. The majority of researches in phonetics is devoted to the phonetics of only one particular language which is studied by the researcher. Attempts to research all sounds were reduced to enumerate them, to arrange them in a 2D-table and “dumping a heap”. 2) Simplification of sounds’ designation. In many languages, letters of the Latin alphabet are used. But this is not enough to reflect the whole variety of sounds of whatever language. Therefore diacritical signs are in use (“birds”, “hats”, “strokes”, “dashes”, “points”, etc.) or sounds are denoted by letter combinations. 3) Presence of superfluous letters in the Russian alphabet. Examples: the letters ш and щ denote hard and soft version of one sound; the letter я, placed in the beginning of a word, denotes not one sound but two. 4) Inadequate writing of some words in Russian language. And the speech is not only about words with foreign provenance. There are some shortened and composed words that have to be read in one way according to the rules of reading but are read in another. 5) Creation of a sufficiently universal system of a transliteration. There are needed both the transliteration from the Russian language (exactly from the language, not from the alphabet) to the Latin alphabet and the transliteration between the Russian language and other alphabets and hieroglyph systems. 1.3 What do we already have? The listing of sounds that a human is able to articulate and distinguish was done while creating the International phonetic alphabet (IPA). Its description you may find in http://en.wikipedia.org/. The construction is based on the principle: IPA must not have different letters for two sounds if all known languages do not distinguish them. Further, it will be clear that such a principle is bad for a classification purpose. Vowels are arranged in a separate scheme; consonants are arranged in tables. Let us present the tables of consonant letters and the scheme of vowel letters of IPA. 2 It is evident that the tables and the scheme were composed being guided by methods and locations of a sound generation in a vocal apparatus. Further, we will see that the fundamental structure of speech sounds has no relation with sound generation methods. Furthermore, we will see that IPA is a result of an incomplete study and it doesn’t fit all principles declared at its constructing. Note that the set of speech sounds can be splitted more than it is done in IPA. But on some stage of splitting one should stop, since the sounds have to be united into equivalence classes. 1.4 What do we have below? The scheme of the Mikrusian alphabet is given in section 3 of this report. To study this scheme one should know what sound is denoted by each letter. This is easy to determine from the table in section 2. In other sections the alphabet order is shown, variants of lowercase and uppercase letters are given, the description of regularity of the Mikrusian alphabet scheme and of its structure is given, the rules for designation of sounds are described. Definitions are given and constructing principles for the structure of sounds (equivalence classes) are described. In the end, the standard PC-keyboard layout for the Mikrusian alphabet is shown. Let us make an important remark. It is weak-promising to classify everything. The Mikrusian alphabet is not destined to classify all sounds. Some of them were excluded from the consideration in concordance with the idea of the fourth subproblem. 3 2 The table of the Mikrusian alphabet of 30 letters Letter Hand- Letter Articulate Articulate Latin letters Comment written name like the 1st like chosen combination letter sound in letters in the analogue the word word А а A a а uncle butter a О о O o о obvious shore o У у Y y у uhlan book u I i j i i eat bee i Е е E e е element pencil e И и U u и ih * Russian ы, Ukrainian и.