YPA (Yinrih Phonetic Alphabet) Now that I'm working on Outlander, and since I want to start working on Hearthsider in the future, I decided I want to create a universal system for referring to yinrih speech sounds. Here is one candidate. Yinrih language is highly tonal. Plenty of Terran languages (Sino-Tibetan especially) like to refer to tones by number. So I've expanded this system to encompass not just tone, but all the features of a vowel. Consonants are indicated by letters (case insensative). Vowels Timing 1 short 2 long 3 early 4 late 5 overlong Tone 1 low 2 high 3 rising 4 falling 5 peaking 6 dipping Strength 1 weak 2 strong 3 strengthening 4 weakening 5 cresting 6 troughing Phonation 1 whine 2 growl 3 grunt 4 plain hiss vowel 5 trilled hiss vowel Consonants h huff c chuff y yip p plain hiss semivowel t trilled hiss semivowel The system meets my criterion of only containing ASCII characters, but it's not compact in the slightest. Just the word paw is . Thoughts?