Guarani alphabet
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The Guarani alphabet (achegety) is used to write the Guarani language, spoken mostly in Paraguay and nearby countries. It consists of 33 letters.[1]
Orthography
| Majuscule forms (also called uppercase or capital letters) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| A | Ã | Ch | E | Ẽ | G | G̃ | H | I | Ĩ | J | K | L | M | Mb | N | Nd | Ng | Nt | Ñ | O | Õ | P | R | Rr | S | T | U | Ũ | V | Y | Ỹ | [[Modifier letter apostrophe|Template:Hamza]] |
| Minuscule forms (also called lowercase or small letters) | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| a | ã | ch | e | ẽ | g | g̃ | h | i | ĩ | j | k | l | m | mb | n | nd | ng | nt | ñ | o | õ | p | r | rr | s | t | u | ũ | v | y | ỹ | Template:Hamza |
| IPA values | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| a | ã | ʃ~ɕ | e | ẽ | ɰ~ɣ | ɰ̃~ŋ | h | i | ĩ | j~dʒ | k | l | m | ᵐb | n | ⁿd | ᵑɡ~ŋ | ⁿt | ɲ | o | õ | p | ɾ | r | s | t | u | ũ | ʋ | ɨ | ɨ̃ | ʔ |
Their respective names are:
- a, ã, che, e, ẽ, ge, g̃e, he, i, ĩ, je, ke, le, me, mbe, ne, nde, nge, nte, ñe, o, õ, pe, re, rre, se, te, u, ũ, ve, y, ỹ, puso.
Description
The six letters ⟨a, e, i, o, u, and y⟩ denote vowel sounds, the same as in Spanish, except that ⟨y⟩ is a high central vowel, Template:IPAblink. The vowel variants with a tilde are nasalized. (Older books used diaereses or circumflexes to mark nasalization.)[2] The apostrophe Template:Angbr called "Script error: No such module "Lang"." (lit., sound cut off) represents a glottal stop Template:IPAblink; older books wrote it with Template:Angbr. All the other letters (including ⟨ñ⟩, ⟨g̃⟩, and the digraphs) are consonants, pronounced for the most part as in Spanish.
The Latin letters b, c, and d are used only as parts of digraphs, while f, q, w, x, and z are not used at all. (Older books wrote modern Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr as Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr, respectively.) The letter L and the digraph Template:Angbr are only used in words adopted from Spanish. The Spanish Template:Angbr digraph is not used in Guarani.
Despite its spelling, the Template:Angbr digraph is not the Spanish affricate sound Template:IPAblink (English ⟨ch⟩ as in teach), but an alveolo-palatal fricative Template:IPAblink (similar English ⟨sh⟩ as in ship, or French ⟨ch⟩ as in chapeau). Occasionally, Template:Angbr is written for this sound, following Portuguese and medieval Spanish usage.
⟨g⟩ is the voiced velar approximant Template:IPAblink, similar to Spanish haga; it is not a plosive (Template:IPAblink) as in English gate.
⟨v⟩ is the English and French voiced labiodental fricative Template:IPAblink, as in Victor, not the Spanish bilabial. It is also pronounced as the labiodental approximant Template:IPAblink, which is like Template:IPAblink with the lower lip touching the upper teeth.
⟨h⟩ Template:IPAblink and ⟨j⟩ Template:IPAblink are used with their English values, as in hand and jelly; older books wrote these sounds with Template:Angbr and Template:Angbr, respectively. For some speakers, Template:IPAblink freely varies with the Spanish Template:IPAblink, like the ⟨j⟩ in José. In some dialects, the letter ⟨j⟩ is pronounced Template:IPAblink (a pre-stopped palatal approximant).
The tilded versions of E, I, U, Y, and G are not available in ISO Latin-1 fonts, but can be represented in Unicode (except that tilded "G" is not available as a single precomposed letter, and must be encoded as a plain "G" plus a combining tilde). In digital environments where those glyphs are not available, the tilde is often postfixed to the base character ("E~", "I~", "U~", "Y~", "G~") or a circumflex is used instead ("Ê", "Î", "Û", "Ŷ", "Ĝ").
The acute accent "´" is used to indicate the stress (muanduhe), as in áva Script error: No such module "IPA". ("hair") and tái Script error: No such module "IPA". ("peppery"). When omitted, the stress falls on a nasalized vowel, or, if none, on the last syllable, as in syva Script error: No such module "IPA". ("forehead") and tata Script error: No such module "IPA". ("fire").
History
Up to the Spanish Conquest of the Americas in the 16th century, the Guaraní people did not have a writing system. The first written texts in Guaraní were produced by Jesuit missionaries, using the Latin script. The priest Antonio Ruíz de Montoya documented the language in his works Tesoro de la lengua guaraní (a Guarani-Spanish dictionary, printed in 1639) and Arte y bocabvlario de la lengua guaraní (a grammar compendium and dictionary, printed in 1722) among others.
The alphabet and spelling used in those early books were somewhat inconsistent and substantially different from the modern ones. In 1867, Mariscal Francisco Solano López, president of Paraguay, convened a Script Council to regulate the writing, but the effort was not successful.
The orthography was finally standardized in its present form in 1950, at the Guarani Language Congress in Montevideo, by initiative of Template:Ill. The standards was influenced by the International Phonetic Alphabet notation, and it is now universally used in Paraguay.
Nonetheless, there is still some disagreement between literates on details of the standard. Some feel that the digraph Template:Angbr should be changed to Template:Angbr (as in Portuguese, Galician and Old Spanish), and that Template:Angbr should be replaced by plain Template:Angbr, with the tilde being placed on one of the adjacent vowels.
The Guarani name for the alphabet, Script error: No such module "Lang"., is a neologism formed from a-che-ge (the names of the first three letters) and ty meaning "grouping", "ensemble".
Toponyms and proper names
There are many toponyms and some proper names derived from Guarani in Bolivia, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil. These are usually written according to the Spanish and Portuguese systems, and their pronunciation has often changed considerably over the centuries, to the point that they may no longer be understood by modern Guarani speakers.