The Rheinische Dokumenta (German pronunciation: [ˈʁaɪnɪʃə dokuˈmɛnta]) 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 in 1986 by the Landschaftsverband Rheinland.^[1]

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 and Eschweiler, Essen, Eupen, Gennep, Gummersbach, Heinsberg, Karlsruhe, Kaiserslautern, Kerkrade and Herzogenrath, Cleves, Koblenz, Limburg, Ludwigshafen, Luxembourg, Maastricht, Mainz, Malmedy, Mönchengladbach, Nijmegen, Oberhausen, Prüm, Raeren, Saarbrücken, Siegen, Trier, Venlo, St. Vith, Wiesbaden, Wipperfürth, Wuppertal, Xanten, and many more.

Rheinische Dokumenta was designed to be easily readable for dialect speakers educated in German writing, but there are some differences that make it quite distinct from the usual ways of writing the dialects: There is no doubling of consonants to mark short vowels, and there are extra diacritical marks. The German letters ⟨z⟩ and ⟨x⟩ are spelled ⟨ts⟩ and ⟨ks⟩, German ⟨ch⟩ is spelled ⟨k⟩ when it indicates a /k/ pronunciation, German ⟨qu⟩ is spelled ⟨kw⟩. These spellings appear in other Germanic languages as well, but Rhinelanders are generally not accustomed to them.

Letters

The Rheinische Dokumenta uses the letters of today's ISO basic Latin alphabet, without ⟨c⟩, ⟨q⟩, ⟨x⟩, ⟨y⟩, ⟨z⟩, though it has the digraphs ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ch⟩, ⟨ng⟩, trigraph ⟨sch⟩. In addition, the three common German Umlauted letters are used: ⟨ä⟩, ⟨ö⟩, ⟨ü⟩, and ten more letters, digraphs, and a trigraph, each having diacritical marks:

Each letter, digraph, or trigraph is strictly representing one phone. Most letters represent the usual sounds for which they are used in the German alphabet or, slightly less so, in the Dutch alphabet or that of the Luxembourgish language. 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 declined or conjugated, always the most phonetically correct letters, digraphs, or trigraphs are being used.

Accents

Stress and the tonal accents are usually ignored when writing in Rheinische Dokumenta. There are diacritics to indicate them, but since they are seen to considerably hamper readability, make prints ugly, and are hardly necessary to facilitate understanding, they are seldom used. Some dialects do not have tonal accent anyway. For the other ones, there are only a very few word pairs or triplets 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,^[2] is not preserved in Rheinische Dokumenta writing.

Vowels

Vowels come in two variants, short and long. That many dialects feature three distinct vowel lengths is ignored, as doing so does not create any ambiguities and makes reading easier. Short vowels are represented by single letters, long vowels are represented by the same letters doubled to indicate lengthening.

Consonants

Since most dialects follow the German, and Lower Franconian, rule of final-obstruent devoicing, voiced consonants cannot, or hardly ever, appear at the end of a word or sentence. This is one of the major differences between Rheinische Dokumenta and Standard German writing, since Standard German orthography tries to keep word stems unaltered, even if pronunciation varies with suffixes, endings, or phonological rules. If there is assimilation or other sandhi across word boundaries which yields a consonant voiced at a word end, some authors write them as contractions or join the words with a dash "-" to avoid having final voiced consonants.

Typographical considerations

Rheinische Dokumenta has several diacritical marks, some of which have their typographical peculiarities.

Umlauts can be seen as their counterparts in German, or Latin script, typography.

The "central hook below", which is being used to denote openness of the vowels ą̈, ǫ, ǫ̈. respectively, could be confused with the ogonek. In fact, it is different. While the ogonek is to be placed somewhat off the optical center of the glyph it goes with, the Rheinische Dokumenta hook explicitly goes to its center. Thus it gives another impression and does not resemble the ogonek. Most Rheinische Dokumenta prints choose it to be slightly more angular, longer, and thus appear bolder than ogoneks usually are.

The "center dot below" may not always be available. Using z as a replacement for ṣ is recommended in such cases, resembling Dutch writing. There are no such replacements or recommendations for the letters ạ, and ṛ, respectively, which are comparatively much less used.

When the "horizontal bar below" is not available, using the glyph ə as a replacement for e̩, when possible, is recommended in such cases.

The phoneme denoted by ŋ in print, alternately spelt ng, never appears at the beginning of a syllable, word, or sentence. Yet its upper case version could be used in all caps or small caps type.

The two variations of sch, and the three variations of ch, when written in title case, usually have only their 1st character uppercased, when used in all caps or small caps, however, each letter is converted to upper case.

Unicode

Rheinische Dokumenta cannot currently be fully written in Unicode but proposals are underway to have missing pieces added.

Rheinische Dokumenta is part of the Latin character set of Unicode, and thus part of its Basic Multilingual Plane (Unicode). It is to a large extent covered by single code points. While unaccented characters do that anyway, even some of the characters having diacritical marks nevertheless occupy only one character position in a text stream in their normalized form.

References

External links

• Unicode combining diacritials