Monday, November 11, 2019

Ekalipi Cheat Sheet for Phonetic Names


Please read this, if you are used to typing in Roman script

Typing in Ekalipi on your phone may initially seem intimidating or pointless to people who are used to typing English and other languages on their phone. It actually is not. Once you start using it, you will wish that you had heard about Ekalipi sooner.
Let us quickly understand why tying in  Ekalipi is far superior to typing in the Roman script (especially the 26 letter script) that we are most familiar with. To start with, 26 letters are not sufficient to represent the 44 basic sounds in the English language.
When it comes to sounds from other language families, the letter sounds sometimes simply do not exist.
What makes things even worse is that the letter sounds that you learnt in the alphabet sound charts as a child  almost never correspond to the actual sound of the letter when it is used  in words.  For example, a simple name like ‘Dee” is not just the letter “D”. It in fact is actually written as “Dee”. Crazy!
We could go on and on but for the sake of brevity, we will refer you to our web page www.ekalipi.org.

Ekalipi makes it simple. Ignore the English or Anglicized spelling. Silently, sound out the word that you want to type. Use the letters of the Ekalipi script to type the word just as it sounds.

English to Ekalipi Chart:
To render the correct sound of letters Ekalipi currently uses 38 characters. Their relationship to English letters is shown in the table below. Watch our video at www.ekalipi.com to learn the actual sounds of these letters:

a
e
o
u
l
n
t
c
j
s
w
 a
e
o
u
l
n
t
c
j
s
w
ā
ee
ö
uu
φ
ŋ
ŧ
č
ɉ
z
v
@


ū

л





å










Δ










λ











There are two additional essential characters in Ekalipi. They have no sound themselves. :
      - (hyphen) is used to combine 2 letters (usually consonants). In English, it is not clear whether two letters should be pronounced consecutively of separately. In Ekalipi, it is clear e.g. s-t and r-t in s-tar-t. You will appreciate its benefits once you use Ekalipi.
      Ø is used when two characters (again usually consonants) are to be pronounced quickly without an intermediate “a” sound. You will find it especially useful in pronouncing names correctly in the Ekalipi Cal Announcer phone app.
For more information, please refer to the Ekalipi documentation on the web at www.ekalipi.org www.ekalipi.com and www.wikilipi.com .