The Romic Alphabet, sometimes known as the Romic Reform, is a phonetic alphabet proposed by Henry Sweet. It descends from Ellis's Palaeotype alphabet and English Phonotypic Alphabet, and is the direct ancestor of the International Phonetic Alphabet. In Romic every sound had a dedicated symbol, and every symbol represented a single sound. There were no capital letters; there were letters derived from small capitals, though these were distinct letters.
There were two variants, Broad Romic and Narrow Romic. Narrow Romic utilized italics to distinguish fine details of pronunciation; Broad Romic was cruder, and in it the vowels had their English "short" sounds when written singly, and their "long" sounds when doubled:
Sweet adopted from Ellis and earlier philologists a method creating new letters by rotating existing ones, as in this way no new type would need to be cast:
The IPA letter acquired its modern pronunciation and first use with this alphabet. He resurrected three Anglo-Saxon letters, ash , eth and thorn , the first two of which had the pronunciations they retain in the IPA.
Tables
Consonants
The consonants were as follows by 1892:
were eventually replaced with in the IPA. Apart from Sweet's use of italic h for voicelessness, the rest of the alphabet continues intact in the modern IPA.
Sounds (Work in Progress):
mh: /m̥/
m: /m/
nh: /n̥/
n: /n/
ñh: /ɲ̥/
ñ: /ɲ/
ŋh: /ŋ̥/
ŋ: /ŋ/
p: /p/
b: /b/
t: /t/
d: /d/
Vowels
The vowels were as follows by 1892.
In "wide" vowels, the tongue is described as relaxed and flattened; in "narrow", it is tense and more convex. This corresponds to descriptions of vowels as lax and tense. Lax vowels are indicated by italic type. In the case of the mid back unrounded vowel , the description of its place of articulation does not accord well with some of the words given as examples. Sweet described vowels as narrowed with the tongue raised as in high vowels, but the jaw open as in low vowels. This conflicts with the presentation of the IPA, in which high and close are synonymous, as are low and open. Other than the back unrounded vowels and the value of for IPA (but also for English bird, in broad notation), Sweet's notation is essentially that of the IPA.
Italic a takes its traditional shape, which would later be made distinct in the IPA. That is, italic a was , and italic ɐ, . Long vowels are written double. Nasal vowels with an italic nasal consonant letter, such as or (for French) .
These are defined by Sweet as: : French , : German , Scots , : Swedish : French , : French , : Swedish : Welsh , : German , : English sir : Norwegian , ... : Gaelic , : English but, : Cockney park : French , Scots , : German , : English law
The lax vowels are defined by Sweet as: : English bit, : English men, : English man : French , : (German is overrounded œ) : English pretty, : start of English eye, better, : start of English how, Portuguese : English value, : French : English father, : Swedish : English put, : German , English boy, : English not
History
The 1877 version of the Romic alphabet differed rather substantially from the 1892 version. It was very similar to Ellis's Paleotype.
Vowels
Central vowels were indicated with a non-italic 'h' rather than a diaeresis, with regular for later irregular .
The unrounded back vowels were irregular in their composition, in that laxness was not indicated by italicizing, which was used instead for the low vowels. They were (tense) high , mid (English but), low and (lax) high , mid (English father) and low (Scots ).
was used for the unstressed English schwa. It was not listed in the vowel chart because it was not considered to have any particular articulation, being merely an independent element of voicing (what Sweet called a 'glide vowel'), and the voiced equivalent of unarticulated (which would later become ). is an open glottis, (or ) a whispery glottis.
Nasal vowels were indicated with a following italic 𝑛, the French "guttural" nasals with a following italic 𝑞, as in and .
Vowel length was indicated with a following rather than doubling, as in (or extra-long ).
Reduced or barely pronounced sounds were marked by brackets, so .
Indices were used to avoid complex detail when it would be understood, as for English diphthongal
Consonants
Glottal stop was x, the velar nasal q. Digraphs were used where later Sweet would use distinct characters.