Dania transcription

It was invented by Danish linguist Otto Jespersen and published in 1890 in the Dania, Tidsskrift for folkemål og folkeminder magazine from which the system was named.

A conference held in Copenhagen in 1925 under the auspices of the Union Académique Internationale (UAI) produced recommendations for an international phonetic alphabet that was a compromise between Dania transcription, the still nascent IPA alphabet, and other systems then in use.

Members of the convention objected, for example, to the non-iconic handling of palatal consonants in the IPA, and they excluded the letter C altogether.

Tone is indicated by staveless marks before the syllable, e.g. [ˉa] level, [´a] rising, [ˋa] falling, [ˆa] rising-falling, [ˇa] falling-rising, [˜a] 'waving'.

(A diacritic that resembles '()' joined at their tips, not supported by Unicode, is an alternative choice for 'voiced'.)

[ʃ ʒ] are retained generic hushing fricatives, covering both [ʂ ʐ] and palatal s-loop, z-loop.

For fricatives, Greek [ϕ β] (bilabial), [ϑ δ] (dental) and [χ γ] (velar) are used.

For the velar nasal, a variant with the tail is raised to [ꬻ] (as in Teuthonista) was chosen to avoid clashing with diacritics placed under the letter.

Uvulars are small-cap Latin [ᴋ] (or [q]), [ɢ], [ɴ], [ʟ] (predating any IPA letter for this sound), [ʀ] and full-cap Greek [Χ] [Γ] for the fricatives.

Clicks are indicated with a raised triangle over or after a letter (not supported by Unicode, but approximately [t̄̂] or [tᐞ]).