This website uses two different orthographies for text in Abesabesi - the
IPA orthography and the Yoruba orthography. The documentation project has
made use of an IPA based orthography, which is also used throughout the
Abesabesi grammar. Since the grammar is directed at an audience of
linguists, the IPA orthography guarantees an easy access for typologists and
linguists that are not familiar with the Yoruba or Pan-Nigerian alphabets.
The dictionary, however, should also
be accessible to the language community and therefore uses an orthography
that bases on the Yoruba alphabet. Although the dictionary uses lemmas in
the Yoruba orthography, it reveals the IPA spelling of every lexical entry
under the field "Pronunciation". The Yoruba orthography follows the same
rules as the IPA orthography, which will be explained in this section.
However, it replaces the following IPA symbols with characters from the
Yoruba alphabet.
Table : IPA symbols and their equivalent in the Yoruba alphabet
| IPA | Yoruba | |
| ɛ | -> | ẹ |
| ɔ | -> | ọ |
| ʃ | -> | ṣ |
| dʒ | -> | j |
| j | -> | y |
| ŋ | -> | ng |
| ɲ | -> | ny |
| ʷ | -> | w |
The IPA orthography is phonemic with a few rules to ensure consistency and
simplicity. IPA symbols are used as graphemes. Diacritics are only used when
they mark a phonemic feature. For instance, labialization is only written
where it appears in root morphemes, ties to mark double articulation are
omitted, but tone marks and the nasalization tilde are used. As the
orthography is phonemic, only one grapheme is used for allophones:
<r> for all rhotic sounds and
<ʃ> for the allophones [ʃ]
and [t͜ʃ]. Vowel harmony is represented as it is
pronounced instead of writing archiphones. Assimilation is not represented
in the orthography and the original phonemes are transcribed. Vowel
lengthening is represented by two vowel graphemes. The more drastic rules
concern wordhood and tones. These rules have been adapted to facilitate the
transcription of large amounts of data. Phenomena that are thus not
transcribed, such as the five grammatical tones, have been described in the
previous paragraphs so that the information is not lost to future
researchers. In the sense of language documentation, a more detailed
description could be added in later stages if research extends to these
phenomena.