Guarani Alphabet
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The Guarani alphabet (''achegety'') is used to write the
Guarani language Guaraní (), specifically the primary variety known as Paraguayan Guarani ( "the people's language"), is a South American language that belongs to the Tupi–Guarani family of the Tupian languages. It is one of the official languages of P ...
, spoken mostly in
Paraguay Paraguay (; ), officially the Republic of Paraguay ( es, República del Paraguay, links=no; gn, Tavakuairetã Paraguái, links=si), is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the south and southwest, Brazil to th ...
and nearby countries. It consists of 33 letters.


Orthography

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, Y denote vowel sounds, the same as in Spanish, except that Y is a high central vowel, . The vowel variants with a
tilde The tilde () or , is a grapheme with several uses. The name of the character came into English from Spanish, which in turn came from the Latin '' titulus'', meaning "title" or "superscription". Its primary use is as a diacritic (accent) in ...
are
nasalized In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internationa ...
. (Older books used diaereses or
circumflex The circumflex () is a diacritic in the Latin and Greek scripts that is also used in the written forms of many languages and in various romanization and transcription schemes. It received its English name from la, circumflexus "bent around"a ...
es to mark nasalization.) The apostrophe (') represents a
glottal stop The glottal plosive or stop is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents thi ...
; older books wrote it with . 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, D are used only as parts of digraphs, while F, Q, W, X, Z are not used at all. (Older books wrote modern and as and , respectively.) The letter L and the digraph are only used in words adopted from
Spanish Spanish might refer to: * Items from or related to Spain: **Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain **Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries **Spanish cuisine Other places * Spanish, Ontario, Cana ...
, words influenced by Spanish phonology, or non-verbal
onomatopoeia Onomatopoeia is the process of creating a word that phonetically imitates, resembles, or suggests the sound that it describes. Such a word itself is also called an onomatopoeia. Common onomatopoeias include animal noises such as ''oink'', ''m ...
s. The Spanish digraph is not used in Guarani. Despite its spelling, the digraph is not the Spanish affricate sound (English "ch" as in "teach"), but a fricative (English "sh" as in ''ship'', French "ch" as in ''chapeau''). Occasionally, is written for this sound, following
Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...
and medieval Spanish usage. "G" is the voiced velar
spirant A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...
, as in Spanish ''haga''; it is not a
plosive In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases. The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips ...
() as in English ''gate''. "V" is the English and French voiced labiodental fricative , as in ''Victor'', not the Spanish
bilabial In phonetics, a bilabial consonant is a labial consonant articulated with both lips. Frequency Bilabial consonants are very common across languages. Only around 0.7% of the world's languages lack bilabial consonants altogether, including Tlingi ...
. It is also pronounced as the
labiodental In phonetics, labiodentals are consonants Place of articulation, articulated with the lower lip and the upper teeth. Labiodental consonants in the IPA The labiodental consonants identified by the International Phonetic Alphabet are: The IPA c ...
approximant , which is like with the lower lip touching the upper teeth. "H" and "J" are used with their English values, as in ''hand'' and ''jelly''; older books wrote these sounds with and , respectively. For some speakers, freely varies with the Spanish , like the "J" in ''José''. The tilde'ed versions of E, I, U, Y, and G are not available in
ISO Latin-1 ISO/IEC 8859-1:1998, ''Information technology — 8-bit single-byte coded graphic character sets — Part 1: Latin alphabet No. 1'', is part of the ISO/IEC 8859 series of ASCII-based standard character encodings, first edition published in ...
fonts, but can be represented in
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
(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 The acute accent (), , is a diacritic used in many modern written languages with alphabets based on the Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek scripts. For the most commonly encountered uses of the accent in the Latin and Greek alphabets, precomposed ch ...
"´" is used to indicate the
stress Stress may refer to: Science and medicine * Stress (biology), an organism's response to a stressor such as an environmental condition * Stress (linguistics), relative emphasis or prominence given to a syllable in a word, or to a word in a phrase ...
(''muanduhe''), as in ''áva'' ("hair") and ''tái'' ("peppery"). When omitted, the stress falls on a nasalized vowel, or, if none, on the last syllable, as in ''syva'' ("forehead") and ''tata'' ("fire").


History

Up to the
Spanish Conquest The Spanish Empire ( es, link=no, Imperio español), also known as the Hispanic Monarchy ( es, link=no, Monarquía Hispánica) or the Catholic Monarchy ( es, link=no, Monarquía Católica) was a colonial empire governed by Spain and its predece ...
of the Americas in the 15th century, the
Guaraní Guarani, Guaraní or Guarany may refer to Ethnography * Guaraní people, an indigenous people from South America's interior (Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia) * Guaraní language, or Paraguayan Guarani, an official language of Paraguay * ...
people did not have a writing system. The first written texts in Guaraní were produced by
Jesuit , image = Ihs-logo.svg , image_size = 175px , caption = ChristogramOfficial seal of the Jesuits , abbreviation = SJ , nickname = Jesuits , formation = , founders ...
missionaries, using the
Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy ...
. The priest Antonio Ruíz de Montoya documented the language in his works ''Tesoro de la lengua guaraní'' (a Guarani-Spanish
dictionary A dictionary is a listing of lexemes from the lexicon of one or more specific languages, often arranged alphabetically (or by radical and stroke for ideographic languages), which may include information on definitions, usage, etymologies ...
, printed in 1639) and ''Arte y bocabvlario de la lengua guaraní'' (a
grammar In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structure, structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clause (linguistics), clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraint ...
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 Francisco Solano López Carrillo (24 July 1827 – 1 March 1870) was President of Paraguay from 1862 until his death in 1870. He was the eldest son of Juana Pabla Carrillo and of President Carlos Antonio López, Francisco's predecessor. ...
, 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 Montevideo () is the Capital city, capital and List of cities in Uruguay, largest city of Uruguay. According to the 2011 census, the city proper has a population of 1,319,108 (about one-third of the country's total population) in an area of . M ...
, by initiative of Reinaldo Decoud Larrosa. The standards was influenced by the
International Phonetic Alphabet The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is an alphabetic system of phonetic transcription, phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin script. It was devised by the International Phonetic Association in the late 19th century as a standa ...
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 should be changed to (as in
Portuguese Portuguese may refer to: * anything of, from, or related to the country and nation of Portugal ** Portuguese cuisine, traditional foods ** Portuguese language, a Romance language *** Portuguese dialects, variants of the Portuguese language ** Portu ...
, Galician and
Old Spanish Old Spanish, also known as Old Castilian ( es, castellano antiguo; osp, romance castellano ), or Medieval Spanish ( es, español medieval), was originally a dialect of Vulgar Latin spoken in the former provinces of the Roman Empire that provided ...
), and that should be replaced by plain , with the tilde being placed on one of the adjacent vowels. The Guarani name for the alphabet, ', is a
neologism A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...
formed from ''a-che-ge'' (the names of the first three letters) and ''ty'' meaning "grouping", "ensemble".


Toponyms and proper names

There are many
toponym Toponymy, toponymics, or toponomastics is the study of '' toponyms'' (proper names of places, also known as place names and geographic names), including their origins, meanings, usage and types. Toponym is the general term for a proper name of ...
s and some proper names derived from Guarani in
Argentina Argentina (), officially the Argentine Republic ( es, link=no, República Argentina), is a country in the southern half of South America. Argentina covers an area of , making it the second-largest country in South America after Brazil, th ...
,
Uruguay Uruguay (; ), officially the Oriental Republic of Uruguay ( es, República Oriental del Uruguay), is a country in South America. It shares borders with Argentina to its west and southwest and Brazil to its north and northeast; while bordering ...
,
Paraguay Paraguay (; ), officially the Republic of Paraguay ( es, República del Paraguay, links=no; gn, Tavakuairetã Paraguái, links=si), is a landlocked country in South America. It is bordered by Argentina to the south and southwest, Brazil to th ...
, and
Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
. 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.


See also

*
Guarani Braille Guarani Braille is the braille alphabet of the Paraguayan Guarani language.UNESCO (2013World Braille Usage 3rd edition. Letter assignments are those of Spanish Braille (except for the accented vowels): that is, the basic braille alphabet The ...


References

{{reflist


External links


Comparing old and new orthographies
Latin alphabets Guarani languages