a diphthong The double inverted breve below indicates a syllable boundary between vowels The undertie is used for prosody The inverted undertie is used for prosody. Differences from IPA and UPA and languages A major difference is that IPA notation distinguishes between phonetic and phonemic transcription by enclosing the transcription between either brackets or slashes . UPA instead used italics for the former and half bold font for the latter. For phonetic transcription, numerous small differences from IPA come into relevance: UPA e, o denote mid vowels with no particular bias towards open or close, as are found in most Uralic languages. IPA , denote close-mid vowels in particular, common in Romance and West Germanic languages. Being designed for languages largely featuring vowel harmony, UPA has no simple way to denote a basic, backness-ambiguous schwa sound, IPA . denotes a reduced form of e, corresponding with IPA . A further backing diacritic must be appended, resulting in . (This may also stand for a reduced form of , corresponding with IPA ; a distinction rarely encountered in practice.) For the voiced dental fricative, UPA uses a Greek delta , while IPA uses the letter eth . In UPA, eth stands for an alveolar tap, IPA . UPA uses Greek chi χ for the voiceless velar fricative. In IPA, stands for a voiceless uvular fricative, while the velar counterpart is (a symbol unused in UPA). UPA uses small caps for voiceless or devoiced sounds (…), while in IPA, these frequently occur as distinct basic characters denoting entirely separate sounds (e.g. ). UPA does not systematically distinguish approximants from fricatives. j may stand for both the palatal approximant (IPA ) or the voiced palatal fricative (IPA ), v may stand for both the labiodental approximant (IPA ) or the voiced labiodental fricative (IPA ), β may stand for the bilabial approximant (IPA ), the voiced bilabial fricative (IPA ), or in broad transcription even the labiovelar approximant (IPA ). UPA lacks a series of palatal consonants: these must be transcribed by either palatalized alveolar or palatalized velar symbols. Thus may correspond to either IPA or . Examples: Sample This section contains some sample words from both Uralic languages and English (using Australian English) along with comparisons to the IPA transcription. See also Americanist phonetic notation Literature References Phonetic alphabets Unicode Uralic languages