Beria Erfe, Zaghawa

Letters

Combining marks

Numbers

Punctuation

Other

Vowel sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	labio- dental	dental	alveolar	post- alveolar	palatal	velar	glottal
stop	p b			t d		ɟ	k ɡ
fricative		f		s	ʃ			h
nasal	m			n		ɲ	ŋ
approximant	w			l ɻ		j
trill/flap				ɾ

Tone

Beria has 5 tones: high, low, mid, falling, and rising. They are phonemic, and distinguish between words and grammatical categories.

Structure

tbd

Vowel summary table

This table summarises only basic vowel to character assignments.

Letters with a macron above may not have the macron in text, either because it is omitted by the author, or because this is not the first vowel in the word (vowel harmony spreads the effect of the first vowel throughout).

For additional details see vowel_mappings.

Post-consonant vowels

Beria Erfe uses just 5 vowel letters (plus their uppercase equivalents) to represent 9 or 10 vowels (depending on the dialect). Each vowel letter represents either an ATR+ or ATR- sound. 0304 can be used to indicate which sound is used. Since vowel harmony applies across whole words, words using ATR+ vowels are indicated using a combining macron over just the first vowel in the word. Diphthongs are written simply as a sequence of vowel letters.

Consonant summary table

This table summarises only basic consonant to character assignments.

For additional details see consonant_mappings.

Basic consonants

These are the basic consonant letters in Beria Erfe (lowercase to the left, uppercase right).

Click on each letter for more details and for examples of usage.

The Beria language has noticeable allophonic variations for the sound h, but these were not considered important enough to reflect in the writing.

On the other hand, 𖻍, pronounced ɻ, is a more recent addition to the script to cater for Chadian dialects.

𖻏, pronounced ʃ, usually represents sounds from other languages.

Consonant clusters

Since this is an alphabet, the absence of vowel sounds in consonant clusters is marked by simply omitting the vowel letters. There is no special shaping or mark to indicate a consonant cluster. Examples:

𖻂𖻎𖻐𖻂

𖻆𖻌𖻀𖻂

Consonant sounds to characters

Digits

Beria Erfe uses ASCII digits. A set of native digits was considered unnecessary.

Context-based shaping & positioning

Beria Erfe letters don't interact, so no special shaping is needed.

Base characters carry only a single combining mark, since ATR markers and tone markers normally occur over different vowels. The authors of the Unicode proposal are unaware of any words where these two clash.

Transforming characters

The orthography used for Beria Erfe is bicameral, and applications may need to enable transforms to allow the user to switch between cases. Capital letters are used at the beginning of sentences or titles, and for proper nouns. However, usage is rather inconsistent.

A unique feature of Beria Erfe is that uppercase letters extend downwards below the baseline, rather than extending upwards like most scripts. The top of both uppercase and lowercase letters is at the same height.

Most letters have similar shapes in uppercase and lowercase, but a few have shapes that diverge considerably.

The following list shows letters with significant shape changes in uppercase and lowercase, and also shows how the uppercase letters extend downwards, rather than upwards.

Word boundaries

Words are separated by spaces.

Some words are hyphenated. In addition, a hyphen is used by some in the community to separate enclitics.up,6

Graphemes

Graphemes in Beria Erfe consist of single letters or letters with one or two combining marks. This means that text can be segmented into typographic units using grapheme clusters.

Phrase, sentence, and section delimiters are described in phrase.

Phrase & section boundaries

Beria Erfe uses Western punctuation marks.up,6

Quotations & citations

See type samples.

Beria Erfe texts use the following punctuation around quotations. Of course, due to keyboard design, quotations may also be surrounded by ASCII double and single quote marks.up,6

Other inline features

Underlining is sometimes used for Beria Erfe text. When it is, the community prefers the line to pass below the uppercase letters, rather than cutting through them.up,8

Line breaking & hyphenation

Lines are generally broken between words.

Baselines, line height, etc.

Although the Beria Erfe uppercase letters descend below the lowercase letters, the script still uses the 'roman' baseline.

To give an approximate idea of the dimensions relative to Latin text, fig_baselines compares Latin and Beria Erfe glyphs from the SIL Kedebideri font. The height of Beria Erfe letters is the same as the Latin cap height, but uppercase Beria letters extend downwards almost as far as the Latin descenders. The Beria text fits comfortably within the line height needed for the Latin text.