UPA Fonts

To write the UPA, you'll need a Musa font. There's one that's designed for phonetic transcription: Euphonal Musa Ligature. "Euphonal" is the name of the font (and also the Musa abbreviation for the Universal Phonetic Alphabet); "Musa" is the middle name of all Musa fonts; and "Ligature" is the gait: how the letters fit together. It's available in Regular, Bold, Italic, and Bold Italic.

Here's a sample: . You can see that some letters extend above or below the others: ascenders and descenders. You can also see that the  o of Euphonal doesn't slide underneath the top of the following  n, even though there's room. That's because Euphonal is a monospace font with no kerning. That's also why we use a dot to separate words.

Euphonal has some other features that aren't visible in this example. It offers short semivowels, which are typed as if the top and bottom were unconnected: to type , type ‌. It also offers bent accents: to type , type ‌. And of course it offers ligatures, lots of them! For example, the y sound in few will be connected to the preceding f: .

Transliteration Fonts

Transliteration fonts are tricksters: they display letters incorrectly, but in a useful way.

For example, we offer a font called Ripe Musa Trans ("Ripe" is for "Roman IPA" and "Trans" is short for "Transliteration"). In the codepoint E116 for the Musa letter , it displays the IPA symbol n; in the codepoint E2B2 for the Musa letter , it displays the IPA symbols ʥʱ; and so on for all the other Musa letters. As a result, you can transliterate an entire Musa paragraph into IPA simply by changing the font.

We also have a font called Overripe Musa Ruby which does the same thing, but displays the IPA as subtitles under the Musa, so you can see both. Then we have two more fonts, Unripe Musa Trans and Underripe Musa Ruby, that convert in the other direction, from IPA to Musa.

Vocalization Fonts for English

English is famous for crazy spelling, but the English consonants don't pose much of a problem. Most of the craziness arises because English has a lot of vowels (27 by my count), but the Roman alphabet has only 6 vowel letters: a e i o u y. English chose to use digraphs - even separated digraphs - and other tricks to distinguish vowel sounds.

Musa offers a clever solution. If you're writing a dictionary, and you need to indicate pronunciation, you don't need to respell the whole word in UPA or any other system. Instead, we offer a font of small Musa vowels that you can position above the English vowels as superscripts to indicate the pronunciation of the vowels while retaining the conventional spelling - we call them vocritics.

Here's an example of the Pygmalion Musa Diacritic font:

The Galatea Musa Diacritic font is very similar, but uses smaller superscripts and a taller line height to fit consonants over Roman letters, too.

Musa has many more fonts - you can find them here - but the ones above are all you'll need for phonetic transcription.