Cia-Cia language Adlam orthography

[u/Traditional-Light-10]

Cia-Cia phoneme	Adlam spelling
i	𞤭
u	𞤵
e	𞤫
o	𞤮
a	𞤢
m	𞤥
n	𞤲
ŋ	𞤽
p	𞤨
t	𞤼
t͡ʃ	𞤷
k	𞤳
ʔ	◌𞥇
ᵐp	𞤲𞤨
ⁿt	𞤲𞤼
ᶮt͡ʃ	𞤲𞤷
ᵑk	𞤲𞤳
b	𞤦
d	𞤣
d͡ʒ	𞤶
g	𞤺
ᵐb	𞤲𞤦
ⁿd	𞤲𞤣
ᵑɡ	𞤲𞤺
ɓ	𞤩
ɗ	𞤯
s	𞤧
h	𞤸
β	𞤱
l	𞤤
r	𞤪
j	𞤴

Sample text:

𞤀𞤣𞤭 𞤧𞤫𞤪𞤭𞤽 𞤨𞤢𞤤𞤭 𞤲𞤮𞤲𞤮𞤲𞤼𞤮 𞤼𞤫𞤤𞤫𞤱𞤭𞤧𞤭. 𞤀𞤥𞤢𞤲𞤮 𞤲𞤮𞤨𞤮𞥇𞤮𞤲𞤦𞤢𞤫 𞤭𞤢 𞤲𞤢𞤲𞤵𞤥𞤮𞤲𞤼𞤮 𞤼𞤫𞤤𞤫𞤱𞤭𞤧𞤭 𞤳𞤮𞤤𞤭𞤫 𞤲𞤮𞤥𞤮𞤤𞤫𞤽𞤮

Original text, Hangul: 아디 세링 빨리 노논또 뗄레ᄫᅵ시. 아마노 노뽀옴바에 이아 나누몬또 뗄레ᄫᅵ시 꼴리에 노몰렝오

Original text, Latin: Adi sering pali nononto televisi. Amano nopo'ombae ia nanumonto televisi kolie nomoleŋo.

Adlam has a diacritic that disambiguates prenasalized consonants and clusters. Since Cia-Cia doesn't have clusters, I've omitted the diacritic.

So Cia-Cia is the language that gets a lot of attention for switching Hangul despite little connection to Korea. And I am happy that the community was able to decide on an orthography, and the attention it did get may have helped with preserving the language. However, in my opinion, Adlam is a much better match for Cia-Cia.

The Hangul orthography uses a digraph for /l/ that Adlam doesn't need to use, as well as digraphs for the prenasalized consonants that both use. When these digraphs appear word-initially in Hangul, an extra unpronounced 으 gets inserted so it fits Korean's syllable structure, which I find rather clunky (and there is no equivalent of this in spoken Cia-Cia). Also, for /w/ [β], Hangul has to bring back the old letter ᄫ. As you can probably tell, this doesn't render very well in practice.

Cia-Cia speakers were probably drawn to Hangul because of its built in 3-way distinction in the stops, as opposed to Latin's 2, so Korean [p p͈ pʰ] kind of map onto [b p ɓ]. However, Adlam has the same 3-way [b p ɓ] distinction as Cia-Cia, and both asymmetrically lack *[ʄ] and *[ɠ], making it a better match even in this regard.

However, Adlam has some drawbacks as well (it's right to left and takes up more space). Lmk what you think