Rheinische Dokumenta

The Rheinische Dokumenta is a phonetic writing system developed in the early 1980s by a working group of academics, linguists, local language experts, and local language speakers of the Rhineland. It was presented to the public 1986 by the Landschaftsverband Rheinland.It offers a uniform common notation of almost every phoneme spoken in the Lower Rhine area, the western and central Rhineland, the Berg region, the Westerwald, Eifel, and Hunsrück mountain regions, plus the areas surrounding the Nahe and Moselle Rivers.It encompasses the dialects of cities such as
Aachen,
Bingen,
Bonn,
Cologne,
Duisburg,
Düsseldorf,
Eschweiler,
Essen,
Eupen,
Gennep,
Gummersbach,
Heinsberg,
Karlsruhe,
Kaiserslautern,
Kerkrade,
Cleves,
Koblenz,
Limburg,
Ludwigshafen,
Luxembourg,
Maastricht,
Mainz,
Malmedy,
Mönchengladbach,
Nijmwegen,
Oberhausen,
Prüm,
Raeren,
Saarbrücken,
Siegen,
Trier,
Venlo,
St. Vith,
Wiesbaden,
Wipperfürth,
Wuppertal,
Xanten,and many more.

Letters

The Rheinische Dokumenta uses the letters of today's latin alphabet less c, q, x, y, z, plus the bigraphs ch, ch, ng, and the trigraph sch, and in addition, the three common German Umlauts, and

Each letter is strictly representing one phoneme.Most letters represent the usual phonemes for which they are used in the German language writing or, slightly less so, in the Dutch language writing, as well. Several letters are ambiguous in these languages, such as voiced consonants which lose their voice when appearing at the end of a word. These ambiguities are avoided writing Rheinische Dokumenta; despite the fact that word stems may change their printed appearance, when declensed or conjugated, always the most phonetically correct letters are being used.

Accents

Stress, and the tonal accents are usually ignored when writing in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are diacriticals to indicate them, though, but since they are seen to considerably hamper readability, make prints ugly, and are hardly necessary to facilitate understanding, they are seldomly used. Some dialects do not have tonal accents anyway. For the other ones, there are only very few word pairs or triples having identical unaccented Rheinische Dokumenta spellings, but different tonal or stress accents.

Also, other prosody, such as the "melody" of sentence, which carries semantic information in many Rheinisch languages, is not preserved in Rheinische Dokumenta writing.

Vowels

Vowels come in two variants, short and long. The fact that not so few dialects have 3 or more chronemes for vowels is ignored, as it does not create any ambiguitites to do so, and makes reading easier. Short vowels are represented by single letters, long vowels are represented by the same letters doubled to indicate lengthening.

Short Monophtongs

There are 14 short vowels, 13 of which are representable in Rheinische Dokumenta:

Voiced Plosives

External links

* [http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/combining_diacritical_marks/images.htm Unicode combining diacritials]