Old Transliteration System

From MYSTlore

The Old Transliteration System (OTS) is a system for writing D'ni words and texts in Roman characters. Strictly speaking, OTS encompasses several styles of transliteration that share similar features. OTS is the style of transliteration used by RAWA (and, therefore, the "canonical" or "official" style) and is based on the style of transliteration used in the Myst novels.

The hallmark of OTS is the use of digraphs (two-letter combinations that represent a single sound). The exact form of the digraph may be flexible, depending on aesthetic factors. Thus 'ae', 'ay', and 'ai' all represent the single phoneme A^[?] (IPA: [eɪ]).

Most vowels are disambiguated in OTS using either an 'h' or a 'y'. Fricative consonants which do not have their own letter in English are distinguished from related stops with an 'h'. The digraphs chosen generally correspond to spellings that would be intuitive in English.

A limitation of the OTS is that the use of digraphs can introduce ambiguity, since the commonly used letters 'h' and 'y' have phonetic values of their own. A fan alternative, the NTS, addressed this issue through the elimination of digraphs in favor of using diacritics.

Another limitation of the OTS is the difficulty of representing the phoneme I^[?] (IPA: [ɑɪ]) in an aesthetically pleasing way. RAWA has traditionally transcribed this letter as a capital I, even in the middle of words, which is unambiguous but also unusual in Roman writing. Fans have also represented this letter as 'ai', which introduces ambiguity, as this digraph is also used to transliterate the letter A^[?] (IPA: [eɪ]).