Buhid

Plain vowels

a and ʌ are sometimes interchangeable.

Consonant sounds

	labial	alveolar	palatal	velar	glottal
stop	p b	t d		k ɡ	ʔ
fricative	f	s		x ɣ	h
nasal	m	n		ŋ
approximant	w	l	j
trill/flap		r

Tone

Buhid is not a tonal language.

Structure

Barhammb reports 2 syllable types:

CV | CVC

These are combined into words with the following structures:

CVC | CVCV | CVCVC |CVCCVC | CVCCV

Barham reportsmb,9 that certain Tagalog words with the structure CVCVC have corresponding words in Buhid with the structure CVC where there is a tendency to lengthen the single vowel, but only in slow speech.

The following restrictions apply:

Onset

p only appears in loan words. Otherwise all consonants can appear.

Nucleus

Includes any vowel.

Coda

Can be any consonant except f and h.

Barham (p8) provides additional detail about which consonant sequences can appear in clusters.

Vowel summary table

ⓘ represents the inherent vowel. The left column shows dependent vowels, and the right independent.

For additional details see vowel_mappings.

Below is the full set of characters needed to represent the vowels of the Buhid language.

Inherent vowel

ᝃ ka U+1743 LETTER KA

a following a consonant is not written, but is seen as an inherent part of the consonant letter, so ka is written by simply using the consonant letter.

Post-consonant vowels

ᝃᝒ ki U+1743 LETTER KA + U+1752 VOWEL SIGN I

Buhid uses only two combining marks for vowels when it is necessary to override the inherent vowel.

Each vowel sign represents one of 2 sounds. 1752 represents either the sound i or the sound e; 1753 represents either o or u.

In principle, the glyphs look the same, and the distinction is made by position: i ~ e goes above the base, and o ~ u goes below. However, in practise, although the relative height distinction is always preserved, the way the vowel sign connects with the base varies from consonant to consonant. The differences are significant enough to make it worthwhile to show all possible combinations in the table below.

Standalone vowels

ᝀ a U+1740 LETTER A

Vowels at the beginning of a word or following another vowel are actually transcribed in IPA with a preceding glottal stop (ʔ), but they are written using one of 3 independent vowel letters.

As with the vowel signs, these letters each represent one of two possible sounds. (See the box above.)

ᝀᝊᝓᝑ

ᝁᝇᝓ

ᝄᝓᝂ

Vowel sounds to characters

This section maps Buhid vowel sounds to common graphemes in the Buhid orthography.

The left column shows dependent vowels; the right column shows independent vowel letters.

Sounds listed as 'infrequent' are allophones, or sounds used for foreign words, etc.

The f phoneme

The phonetic transcriptions by Barhammb indicate common use of the phoneme f, but no character for that sound exists in the Buhid Unicode block. The Unicode proposal document mentions a possible character for f introduced during a script reform, but doesn't propose anything because it is 'wanting attestation'. Room was left in the block for later additions, if necessary.

It has been difficult to find evidence of how this sound is written, but Satots mentions that in Philippine Latin orthography f is usually written as p. This page therefore uses 1749 to represent this sound. This needs to be checked against actual usage.

Stops

Fricatives

Nasals

Other sonorants

Grapheme clusters

Base Combining_mark*

Buhid typographic units consist of a letter or a letter with a single combining mark (one of two vowel signs). Both of these units fit the definition of a grapheme cluster.

As previously noted, syllable codas are not written in Buhid text, and so the segmentation only captures onsets and the syllable nucleus.

Line-edge rules

As in almost all writing systems, certain punctuation characters should not appear at the end or the start of a line. The Unicode line-break properties help applications decide whether a character should appear at the start or end of a line.

Show line-breaking properties for characters in the Buhid orthography.