General_Alphabet_of_Cameroon_Languages Knowpia

The General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages is an orthographic system created in the late 1970s for all Cameroonian languages.^[1]^[2] Consonant and vowel letters are not to contain diacritics, though ⟨ẅ⟩ is a temporary exception. The alphabet is not used sufficiently for the one unique letter, a bilabial trill, to have been added to Unicode.

Maurice Tadadjeu and Etienne Sadembouo were central to this effort.

Consonants edit

Cameroonian consonants
		Bilabial	labio- dental	inter- dental	dental/ alveolar	pre- palatal	palatal	velar	labio- velar	glottal
Stop	voiceless	p			t			k	kp	ʼ
Stop	voiced	b			d			g	gb
Implosive		ɓ			ɗ		ƴ
Affricate	voiceless		pf	tf	ts	c			kf
Affricate	voiced		bv	dv	dz	j			gv
Fricative	voiceless		f		s	sh		x	xf	h
Fricative	voiced		v		z	zh		gh	hv
Nasal		m			n		ny	ŋ	ŋm
Lateral	approximant				l
	voiceless fric.				sl
	voiced fric.				zl
Vibrant		**	vb		r
Glide		ẅ					y		w

** Like ⟨ɓ⟩, but with the top hook turned to the left.

Aspirated consonants are written ph, th, kh etc. Palatalized and labialized consonants are py, ty, ky and pw, tw, kw etc. Retroflex consonants are written either Cr or with a cedilla: tr, sr or ţ, ş, etc. Prenasalized consonants are mb, nd, ŋg etc. Preglottalized consonants are ʼb, ʼd, ʼm etc. Geminant consonants are written double.

Vowels edit

Cameroonian vowels
	Front unrounded	front/central rounded	central/back unrounded	back rounded
High	i	ɨ [sic]	ʉ [sic]	u
Mid-high	e	ø	ɤ	o
Mid-low	ɛ	œ	ə	ɔ
Low	æ		a/ɑ	α

⟨ɨ⟩ and ⟨ʉ⟩ do not have their IPA values. ⟨ɨ⟩ is a rounded [i] (IPA [y] or [ʉ]) and ⟨ʉ⟩ is an unrounded [u] (IPA [ɯ] or [ɨ]). Long vowels are written double. Nasal vowels may be written with a cedilla: a̧ etc. or with a single following nasal consonant: aŋ etc. (presumably assimilating to any following consonant), in which case [VN] would be written with a double nasal: aŋŋ etc. Harmonic vowels are written with a sub-dot, as ⟨bibị⟩ for [bib-y].

Tones edit

Tone is written as in the IPA, with the addition of a vertical mark for mid-low tone: ⟨á ā a̍ à, â ǎ⟩ etc. (the opposite of the value of the vertical mark elsewhere). Where rising and falling tones only occur on long vowels, they are decomposed: ⟨áà, àá⟩ etc. The high tone mark is used for contrastive stress in languages that do not have tone.

References edit

^ Tadadjeu, Maurice and Etienne Sadembouo. 1979. Alphabet Générale des Langues Camerounaises. Departement des Langues Africaines et Linguistique, Université de Yaoundé, Cameroun.
^ Bird, Stephen. 2001. "Orthography and Identity in Cameroon."