Turoyo (Surayt)

Letters

Combining marks

Punctuation

Other

Vowel sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	dental	alveolar	post- alveolar	palatal	velar	uvular	pharyngeal	glottal
stops & affricates	p b		t d	t͡ʃ d͡ʒ		k ɡ	q		ʔ
ejective			tˤ
fricative	f v	θ ð	s z	ʃ ʒ		x ɣ		ħ ʕ	h
ejective			sˤ
nasal	m		n
approximant	w		l		j
trill/flap			r

As a rule, stress is applied to the penultimate syllable in a word.

In words preceded by a definite article, the definite article assumes the stress from the word.

Tone

Turoyo is not a tonal language.

Structure

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Vowel summary table

The following table summarises the main vowel to character assigments.

The right-hand column shows standalone vowels.

For additional details see vowel_mappings.

The following is the set of characters needed to write vowels, as described in this section, grouped by general category.

Post-consonant vowels

Turoyo written in the 2017 orthography is fully pointed, making it an alphabet rather than an abjad. For vowels, Turoyo uses a set of diacritics based on Greek letters. The position of diacritics relative to the base consonant (above or below) is not interchangeable, but signals different vowel sounds.

There are 3 matres lectionis, and 5 vowel diacritics. Unlike Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, the sounds i and uare written using a mater lectionis with no diacritics.

Standalone vowels

At the beginning of a word, all vowels are attached to or follow a silent ܐ.

Vowel sounds to characters

This section maps Turoyo vowel sounds to common graphemes in the Serto 1917 orthography. Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

All vowels in word initial position precede the characters described below with ܐ.

Consonant summary table

The following table summarises the main consonant to character assigments.

For additional details see consonant_mappings.

Basic consonants

All the letters in the Syriac block are consonants. There are 22 basic consonants, but these can be combined with one of two diacritics to create additional sounds. The combinations are treated as letters of the alphabet, and can be seen in the previous section, consonantSummary.

Hard and soft sounds

Six Syriac consonant symbols represent two sounds, one 'hard' and one 'soft'. The hard sound is an unaspirated plosive, the soft sound is an aspirated fricative. The intended sound of the letter can be made explicit using diacritics.

Hard form. The 2017 orthography uses unmarked letters for the hard form of these consonants, with one exception: 0741 is used to indicate p.

Soft form. A low dot indicates the soft form for 5 plosives. The code point to use is 0742. However, to produce f use an unmarked ܦw.

When it is used with ܕ, which already has a dot below, the two dots appear side by side, ie. ܕ݂ d‐̣

Repertoire extension

In addition to the hard and soft diacritics mentioned above, 0330 is used to represent sounds that are not present in Classical Syriac, and is typically found in loan words.

The 1917 orthography lists only 2 uses, both of which appear below the base consonantss,13:

Whereas Assyrian Neo-Aramaic also uses this diacritic for the sound d͡ʒ, Turoyo has a dedicated letter for that sound (ܔ).ss,13

According to the code point annotations in the Unicode Standard, 0745 and 0746 are also used, specifically in Turoyo, for letters not found in Syriac. However, these are not mentioned in the sources describing the 2017 orthography standardisation. ܐ݅ ܦܪܥܓܬܐ ܔ݆ܰܥܓܰܗ̈

Isolated forms

Isolated versions of 3 letters, such as may be found in counter styles, are usually presented as a doubled letter, using intial and final forms, ie. ܟܟ k ܡܡ m ܢܢ n

Consonant clusters

There is no equivalent to the Arabic sukun to indicate clusters of consonant sounds. Consonant letters are simply juxtaposed with no intervening vowel diacritics.so,18

ܩܡܶܣܬܳܐ

Geminated consonants are written by doubling the letter. A shadda is not used.so,18

ܛܷܒܒܰܟ݂

ܗܷܢܢܶܐ

Consonant length

Geminated consonants are written using doubled letters. There is no equivalent of the Arabic sukun.

Consonant sounds to characters

This section maps Turoyo consonant sounds to common graphemes in the Serto 1917 orthography. Click on a grapheme to find other mentions on this page (links appear at the bottom of the page). Click on the character name to see examples and for detailed descriptions of the character(s) shown.

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

Managing text direction

Unicode provides a set of 10 formatting characters that can be used to control the direction of text when displayed. These characters have no visual form in the rendered text, however text editing applications may have a way to show their location.

202B (RLE), 202A (LRE), and 202C (PDF) are in widespread use to set the base direction of a range of characters. RLE/LRE comes at the start, and PDF at the end of a range of characters for which the base direction is to be set.

In Unicode 6.1, the Unicode Standard added a set of characters which do the same thing but also isolate the content from surrounding characters, in order to avoid spillover effects. They are 2067 (RLI), 2066 (LRI), and 2066 (PDI). The Unicode Standard recommends that these be used instead.

061C (ALM) is used to produce correct sequencing of numeric data. Follow the link and see expressions for details.

There is also 2068 (FSI), used initially to set the base direction according to the first recognised strongly-directional character.

200F (RLM) and 200E (LRM) are invisible characters with strong directional properties that are also sometimes used to produce the correct ordering of text.

For more information about how to use these formatting characters see How to use Unicode controls for bidi text. Note, however, that when writing HTML you should generally use markup rather than these control codes. For information about that, see Creating HTML Pages in Arabic, Hebrew and Other Right-to-left Scripts.

Expressions & sequences

A sequence of European numbers, for example a range separated by hyphens, runs from right to left in the Syriac script (and Arabic or Thaana scripts), whereas for Persian, Hebrew, N’Ko or Adlam scripts it runs left to right.

fig_range shows some Syriac text, which is right-to-left overall, containing a numeric range that is ordered RTL, ie. it starts with 240 and ends with 250.

The Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm automatically produces the expected ordering when a sequence or expression follows Syriac characters. However, a sequence that appears alone on a line doesn't benefit from this, so to make the text appear correctly for Syriac you should add 061C (ALM) at the start of the line (see fig_alm). This is an invisible formatting character.

Similar special ordering is applied to numbers in equations, such as 1 + 2 = 3, for Syriac language text.

For additional details on how direction of ranges interacts with surrounding characters and separators used, see the section Expressions & sequences in the Modern Standard Arabic orthography description.

Cursive text

Syriac is cursive, ie. letters in a word are joined up. Fonts need to produce the appropriate joining form for a code point, according to its visual context, but the code point used for a given letter doesn't change.

Eight letters join only to the right.

All other consonants join on both sides.

Alaph cursive forms

A feature of Eastern and Western Syriac styles is that an unjoined alaph within a word has a different shape according to whether it is word-final or not. For example, fig_alaph_joining shows a sequence where the 2 alaph characters at the end have different shapes, although both are unconnected.

Context-based shaping & positioning

Cursive shaping

See just above for shaping related to cursive joining.

Ligatures

Apart from the shaping required to support cursive behaviour, there are also typical ligatures, such as those shown in fig_serto_lig, some of which are optional or font-dependent.n,19-20

	ܐܠ
	ܓܠ
	ܓܥ
	ܝܬ
	ܠ ܐ
	ܠܐ
	ܠܠ
	ܢܐ
	ܣܛ
	ܨܢ

Context-based positioning

There are sometimes clashes between diacritic marks which have to be resolved by repositioning one of the diacritics, or sometimes producing a different solution.

For example, marks are usually centred vertically over or under a base character. If, however, 0742 appears below ܕ when the glyph for that has a dot below, the mark is moved slightly to the right, as shown here.

Word boundaries

Turoyo uses spaces between words.

There are no one-letter words. One letter conjunctions and prepositions such as ܘ w are continguous with the word they precede.

Graphemes

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Phrase & section boundaries

Turoyo uses ASCII punctuation and punctuation borrowed from Arabic. It also uses Syriac punctuation. For separators at the sentence level and below, the following non-ASCII punctuation is used.

Observation: Šlomo Surayt makes heavy use of the following 2 Syriac punctuation marks as separators: ܇ used where the equivalent English text uses en-dash and semicolon; ܆, used where the English has en-dash or solidus. The Surayt Orthography description, however, seems to equate them with comma and semicolon, respectively.so,18

Mirrored characters

The words 'left' and 'right' in the Unicode names for parentheses, brackets, and other paired characters should be ignored. LEFT should be read as if it said START, and RIGHT as END. The direction in which the glyphs point will be automatically determined according to the base direction of the text.

The number of characters that are mirrored in this way is around 550, most of which are mathematical symbols. Some are single characters, rather than pairs. The following are some of the more common ones.

(␣)␣<␣>␣[␣]␣{␣}␣«␣»␣‹␣›

Line & paragraph layout

Page & book layout

References