2253: Intro to Pinyin Feb 14, 2021

Pinyin is the official system for transliterating Mandarin Chinese using Latin letters, designed in the 1950's. The goal was to make the language easier to teach to those unfamiliar with the language at the beginning stages. That said, as with any writing system the sounds represented will not be exactly the same. In European languages this is of course still true such as the English Z [z] compared to the German Z [ts], but Pinyin established relations between letters that are otherwise related traditionally, like

J [tɕ], Q [tɕʰ], and X [ɕ] or alternatively

Z [ts], C [tsʰ] (granted Z and C these are commonly related in Slavic languages). Overall, the way the spelling is approximated does not take from any single European language, but picks certain ones out individually.

aside from those sounds usually more distant to the Western ear, the system does allow for a general approximation of Chinese pronunciation, especially with vowels.

2224: Lunate Sigma Jan 16, 2021

The Greek letter sigma is special in its design in a number of ways. It is the only to have 3 forms: Σ, σ, and ς (the last only found at the end of words), but even these are not the only way it's looked. The Lunate Sigma used in Greek of the Hellenistic period, was written in a C-like shape, now known as the Lunate Sigma (uppercase Ϲ, lowercase ϲ) called as such in reference to the Moon. This should not be confused for the Latin letter C/c. It only has two forms, laking the distinct word-final form that is found today. These days, it is mostly found in religious contexts or other decorative fonts.

1495: Diphthongs Vs. Spelling Jan 15, 2016

When two vowels combine together in one syllable, it's a diphthong, but orthography doesn't always represent this. For instance, while writing one vowel to correspond with one sound should be easy enough, in words like the English 'I', what is actually two sounds [ai] is represented with one (note that 'eye' accomplishes this). In German, where spelling tends to be more standard, that same sound is represented by writing <ei>, and so that is maintained, but the sound [i]—as in 'key'—in German is usually written with two letters [ie], even though this is not a diphthong. Ultimately, in any language with a written history, tradition will supersede reason at times.

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1120: Vocalic Assimilation in Kalaallisut Jan 2, 2018

English has plenty of examples of assimilation: when a sound consistently changes due to the phonemic context, i.e. the sounds around (particularly after) it. This can be seen with [n], which becomes [m] before sounds like [p] (e.g. 'impossible' is the negating 'in-' prefix + 'possible), or [t] becoming [t͡ʃ] before [ɹ] (e.g. the sound modified from 'tail to 'trail'). In Kalaallisut (a.k.a. West Greenlandic) this is even more extreme. At first glance it may seem that there are between 5 and 11 vowels, but because of assimilation there are only 3 vocalic phonemes: [a], [i], and [u]. Funnily, the alphabet for Kalaallisut contains 5 vowels—A, E, I, O, and U—but E and O only appear before [R] and [q]. All of the other vowels are allophones of [i], [a] or [u], even though they would be considered separate phonemes in other languages such as English. To see the range of each of these Greenlandic vowels, look at this graph below (citation after the links). You can also support Word Facts on Patreon for more content: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts.

Fortescue, Michael (1990), "Basic Structures and Processes in West Greenlandic", in Collins, Dirmid R. F., Arctic Languages: An Awakening (PDF), Paris: UNESCO, p. 317, ISBN 92-3-102661-5