The Standard Alphabet is a Latin-script alphabet developed by Karl Richard Lepsius. Lepsius initially used it to transcribe Egyptian hieroglyphs in his Denkmäler aus Ägypten und Äthiopien and extended it to write African languages, published in 1854 and 1855, and in a revised edition in 1863. The alphabet was comprehensive but was not used much as it contained a lot of diacritic marks and was difficult to read and typeset at that time. It was, however, influential in later projects such as Ellis's Paleotype, and diacritics such as the acute accent for palatalization, under-dot for retroflex, underline for Arabic emphatics, and the click letters continue in modern use. Vowels Vowel length is indicated by a macron (ā) or a breve (ă) for long and short vowels, respectively. Open vowels are marked by a line under the letter (e̱), while a dot below the letter makes it a close vowel (ẹ). Rounded front vowels are written with an umlaut (ö and ü ), either on top or below, when the space above the letter is needed for vowel length marks (thus ṳ̄ or ṳ̆). Unrounded back vowels are indicated by a 'hook' (ogonek) on ę or į. Central vowels may be written as one of these series, or as reduced vowels. As in the International Phonetic Alphabet, nasal vowels get a tilde (ã). A small circle below a letter is used to mark both the schwa (e̥, also ḁ etc. for other reduced vowels) and syllabic consonants (r̥ or l̥, for instance). Diphthongs do not receive any special marking, they are simply juxtaposed (ai ). A short sign can be used to distinguish which element of the diphthong is the on- or off-glide (uĭ, ŭi) Vowels in hiatus can be indicated with a diaeresis when necessary (aï ). Other vowels are a with a subscript e for ; a with a subscript o for , and o̩ for or maybe . The English syllabic is ṙ̥. Word stress is marked with an acute accent on a long vowel (á) and with a grave accent on a short vowel (à). Klemp (p. 56*-58*) interprets the values of Lepsius's vowels as follows: Consonants The Lepsius letters without predictable diacritics are as follows: Other consonant sounds may be derived from these. For example, palatal and palatalized consonants are marked with an acute accent: ḱ , ǵ , ń , χ́ , š́ , γ́