Eastern Cham

Notable features

• no conjuncts; consonant clusters are handled using combining marks for medials, and dedicated letters or marks for codas.
• standalone vowels use independent vowels and base+vowel sign, and independent vowels may also have vowel signs
• ꨀ may carry a medial consonant

Letters

Combining marks

Numbers

Punctuation

Vowel sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	alveolar	palatal	velar	glottal
stop	p b	t d	c	k ɡ͡ɣ	ʔ
	pʰ bʰ	tʰ dʰ	cʰ	kʰ ɡʰ
	ɓ	ɗ
affricate			d͡ʑ
			d͡ʑʰ
fricative		s			h
nasal	m	n	ɲ	ŋ
approximant	w	l	j
trill/flap		ɾ

Tone

Cham is not a tonal language.

Structure

tbd

Vowel summary table

This table summarises only basic vowel to character assignments. Click on the phonetic transcriptions for more detail.

ⓘ represents the inherent vowel. A number of diphthongs listed in the phonology section are missing from this table.

ɨ is an inherent vowel only after nasals (see just below).

Observation: The phonology sources say that the Cham language distinguishes between the phones e, ə, and ɛ, but it isn't clear how to write e. There is a letter than appears to be transcribed as eɪ, which is close - could this be a plain vowel rather than a diphthong?

Inherent vowel

ꨆ ka

ꨗ nɨ

Cham has 2 inherent vowels.

Most consonants have an inherent vowel a.

ꨓꨊꨪꩆ

For nasals, however, the default inherent vowel is ɨ or ə.

ꨀꨗꩀ

ꨟꨓꨩ

To produce a nasal followed by a Cham appends a special mark, called kai, below the nasal (see fig_na). In Unicode these combinations are fused and become atomic code points.

ꨘꩌ

Since Cham consonants normally include an inherent vowel, the orthography has ways to indicate a consonant that is not followed by a vowel sound. See novowel.

Post-consonant vowels

Vowels that follow consonants are written using one or more of 10 combining vowel signs per consonant (this page lists 7 composite vowel signs). There is 1 pre-base vowel, but no circumgraphs (although composite vowel signs may add glyphs to more than one side of the base).

There are no circumgraphs, but there are pre-base vowel signs and composite vowel signs.

All vowel signs are typed and stored after the base consonant, whether or not they precede it when displayed. The glyph rendering system takes care of the positioning at display time. Onsets followed by medial consonants are treated as indivisible units when it comes to rendering vowel signs, meaning that pre-base vowel signs are rendered before the onset as a whole (see prebase).

Two of the vowel signs are spacing marks, meaning that they consume horizontal space when added to a base consonant.

Pre-base vowel signs

ꨆꨯ ko

Cham has 2 characters whose glyphs, when rendered, appear before the consonant letter. They may be used alone, or as a component in 4 more composites.

ꨯ,ꨰ

eg.

ꨝꨯꨱꩍ

ꨚꨈꨯꨮꨩ

This combining mark is always typed and stored after the base consonant. The rendering process places the glyph before the base consonant. The first code point just above can be used on its own, but is also used in conjunction with other vowel combining marks as shown in the examples just above (see compositeV). In this case, it should be typed and stored immediately after the consonant and the other combining marks follow it.

When an orthographic syllable begins with a consonant cluster, the vowel sign is placed before the start of the onset, ie. to the left of the syllable as a whole. This is neatly illustrated in the following example, where the pre-base part of the vowel sign appears before the medial consonant, which itself appears before the base consonant. The encoded sequence, however, follows the pronounciation order.

eg.

ꨚꨴꨯꨱꩃ

ꨚ,ꨴ,ꨯꨱ,ꩃ

Standalone vowels

ꨁ ʔi

Cham has several ways of writing standalone vowel sounds. IPA transcriptions show a glottal stop before word-initial standalone vowels.

Vowel sounds to characters

Consonant summary table

This table summarises only basic consonant to character assignments. Click on the phonetic transcriptions for more detail.

For additional details see consonant_mappings.

Basic consonants

These are the basic consonant letters in Cham.

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

Observation: It's not clear why there are 2 letters for p.

There are 2 sets of nasal letters. The first has the inherent vowel ɨ, which is the default for nasals, and the second, with the extra strokes below, has the normal default inherent vowel a (see inherent).

Although they look complicated, many of the Cham letters share similar shapes. See similar for examples.

Onsets

Cham has the 4 medial consonants shown just above. They are all combining marks, and should be typed and stored immediately after the initial consonant. They carry an inherent vowel, and kill the inherent vowel of the initial consonant.

ꨕꨶ

ꨆꨴꨩ

ꨆꨵꨮꨭ

ꨟꨣꨳꩍ

Medials can be combined for the following cases: -rj-, -rw-, -lj-, and -lw-.e,2

Medials can also be used after ꨀ (see standalone_medial).

Codas

Syllable codas are not followed by a vowel and, since Cham has no virama, they are written using a dedicated set of letters, or in 3 cases combining marks.

The final consonant letters are generally similar to the non-final consonants, but they have a lengthened stroke to the right side of the glyph.

ꨀꨆꨯꨱꩀ

ꨔꩆꨕꨩ

The significant exception is ꨥ, which uses the same code point and glyph whether it appears as an initial or final consonant.

ꨎꨥꨩ

ꨟꨢꨥ

Examples of the combining marks.

ꨁꨗꨤꩃ

ꨚꨵꨭꩍ

ꨌꩌ

Consonant sounds to characters

Codepoint sequences

Characters in a syllable, if they occur, should always occur in the following order.

1. A consonant or independent vowel.
2. One or 2 medial consonants.
3. A pre-base dependent vowel.
4. A non-prebase dependent vowel.
5. A vowel lengthener.
6. A final consonant letter or combining mark.

Context-based shaping & positioning

Cham letters don't form conjuncts and don't normally involve significant shaping in different contexts, but there are a number of combining marks, which often occur in multiples for a given base letter. The positioning of these combining marks may involve adaptations to fit the space available, as well as the need to position them correctly around the base letter.

For instance, the small wavy line below the base is positioned and sized differently in the following 2 words.

ꨔꨮꨭ

ꨆꨵꨮꨭ

Another example of contextual shaping occurs at the end of the following word. Compared to the code point sequence, the glyph sequence switches the order of the 2 rightmost combining marks, and ligates them (in addition to moving the pre-base vowel sign before the consonant).

ꨚꨈꨯꨮꨩ

Similarities in letter shapes

Although they look complicated, many of the Cham letters share similar shapes on the left side. The following lists informally group together a number of letters that begin with similar looking shapes.

Word boundaries

Words are separated by spaces.

Graphemes

tbd

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

Phrase & section boundaries

Cham uses a mixture of ASCII and native punctuation.u

꩜ often begins a section of text. It may also occur in conjunction with a danda.u

Line breaking & hyphenation

Line break opportunities occur at inter-word spaces or after a danda, but also between syllables.u e,3