Navlipi

Navlipi, which means “new script” in Sanskrit and the Sanskrit-descendant languages of the Indian subcontinent, claims to be the world’s first and only practical phonemic script (alphabet), conveying phonemic information. It also claims to be the only universal script that addresses the “phonemic idiosyncrasies” of all the world’s languages; and the only world script conveying information on phonemic idiosyncrasies specific to individual languages.

The script was published as a book by Prasanna Chandrasekhar, consisting of two volumes, by Branden Books in 2012. It was also published as a United States patent by Chandrasekhar on August 20, 2013.^[1]

The current publisher of the book is Alternative Book Press.

The script has been generally well received by critics and academics, most notably by Mark Newbrook,^[2] S.R.S. Jaafar,^[3] and Nicholas Ostler (included as a foreword in the book version).

Background

Navlipi is based on the Roman (Latin) script, in which English is written. In addition to the 26 letters of the Roman script, Navlipi uses just five new or transformed letters (glyphs). It uses no cumbersome diacritics, rather making heavy use of “post-ops”, post-positional operators. A typical Navlipi post-op is h_o, which indicates aspiration, e.g. as in ph_o, the aspirated counterpart of the p sound. Another typical Navlipi post-op is p_∞ which indicates a combination of unvoiced (as in the p sound) and voiced (as in the b sound) phones; this is useful for transcription in a language such as Mandarin, where unvoiced and voiced sounds are frequently part of the same phoneme (in this example transcribed as b_∞); e.g. pu can also be articulated as bu in Mandarin, both meaning “no, not” (transcribed in Navlipi as b_∞u).

Navlipi attempts to be far more thorough, complete, distinct and practical than the alphabet of the International Phonetic Association (IPA), the Americanist alphabet, and other “universal” world scripts. It claims to address the well-known and sometimes serious drawbacks of these scripts even in standard phonetic (i.e., non-phonemic) transcription.

Phonemic Alphabet

A phoneme is a phone (sound) with a linguistic significance. Two (or more) phones can be part of the same phoneme in a language, while they are different phonemes in another language. A good test for this is if substitution of one phone by another changes the meaning of a word in a language. In English, substitution of the [p] phone by the [b] phone completely changes the meaning of a word, as in pit vs. bit; so the phones [p] and [b] are different phonemes in English. However, substitution of [p] by [b] in Mandarin does not change the meaning of a word, as in pu (“no, not”) which can also be pronounced bu, so [p] and [b] belong to the same phoneme in Mandarin.

Phonemic idiosyncrasy can be defined as the existence of very different sets (usually, pairs) of phones (sounds), present as allophones of the same phoneme in one language, whereas the same phones exist as distinct phonemes in another language. One example is the bilabial sound [p] and its aspirated counterpart, [ph], which are allophones of the same phoneme, /p/, in English, whereas they are distinct phonemes in Hindi/Urdu: that is to say, substitution of [ph] by [p] in a word in Hindi/Urdu completely changes the meaning of the word (e.g. phal, “fruit", vs. pal “an instant of time”), whereas it doesn’t in English. Another example is the unvoiced and voiced bilabial phones, [p] and [b], which are allophones of the same phoneme in many Chinese languages (e.g. pu also articulated bu without change of meaning in Mandarin), whereas they are of course different phonemes in most Indo-European languages (e.g. English pet vs. bet). As more peculiar examples, we can cite [x] (uvular/velar fricative, the famous “throaty r“ of Parisian French and also much modern German, a sound coming from deep within the throat), and [r], the rolled or trilled r-sound;. these are two radically different phones of modern French and German but are, nevertheless, part of the same phoneme in Parisian French and standard German. And the phones [v] and [w], which are freely interchanged in Hindi/Urdu and are part of the same phoneme; i.e., one can say "van" or "wan" and still mean “forest”.

Among other things, phonemic idiosyncrasy makes writing diverse languages (e.g. Mandarin and English or Hindi/Urdu and Tamil) in the same script extremely difficult. Navlipi attempts to overcome this difficulty.

Although it emphasizes phonemic expression, Navlipi is also nevertheless a phonetic (phonic) script that claims to transcribe the sounds and features found in all the world’s languages, from the more common ones such as tones to the less common ones such as clicks, ejectives and implosives. It thus claims to be applicable to all the world’s languages: For example, it claims to be capable of transcribing equally well a tonal language such as Mandarin and a click language such as !Xo Bushman.

References

• Chandrasekhar, Prasanna. Navlipi Volume 1: A New, Universal, Script ("Alphabet") Accommodating The Phonemic Idiosyncrasies of All World's Languages. Volume I, Another Look At Phonic and Phonemic Classification: Navlipi. Marlboro, NJ, USA: Alternative Book Press, 2013. ISBN 978-1-940122-00-7 (print edition), ISBN 978-1-940122-01-4 (e-book edition).
• Chandrasekhar, Prasanna. Navlipi Volume II: Navlipi Companion: A Primer in Linguistics, Phonetics, Phonemics and Writing Systems with a Difference. Marlboro, NJ, USA: Alternative Book Press, 2013. ISBN 978-1-940122-02-1 (print edition), ISBN 978-1-940122-03-8 (e-book edition).
• http://navlipi.org/