Guarani alphabet
The Guaraní alphabet (achegety) is a phonetic system used to write the Guaraní language, spoken mostly in Paraguay and nearby countries. It consists of 33 letters, given here in collating order:
- A, Ã, CH, E, Ẽ, G, G̃, H, I, Ĩ, J, K, L, M, MB, N, ND, NG, NT, Ñ, O, Õ, P, R, RR, S, T, U, Ű, V, Y, Ỹ, '.
The six letters "A", "E", "I", "O", "U", "Y" denote vowel sounds; the tilde variants are nasalized versions. The apostrophe " ' " (called puso), represents a glottal stop. All the other letters (including "Ñ", "G̃", and the digraphs) are consonants.
The Latin letters B, C, D are used only as parts of digraphs, while F, Q, W, X, Z are not used at all. The letter "L" and the digraph "RR" are only used in words borrowed from Spanish, words with influence of Spanish phonology, or non verbal onomatopoeias. The Spanish "LL" digraph is not used in Guaraní.
The tilde versions of "E", "I", "U", "Y", and "G" are not available in ISO Latin-1 fonts, and tilde-"G" is not even available as a precomposed combination in Unicode. In digital environments where those glyphs are not available, the tilde is often postfixed to the base character ("E~", "I~", "U~", "Y~", "G~") or a circumflex is used instead ("Ê", "Î", "Û", "Ŷ", "Ĝ").
The acute accent diacritic "´" is used to indicate the stress (muanduhe). When omitted, the stress falls on the last syllable: syva [sy'va] ("forehead"), áva ['ava] ("hair"), tata [ta'ta] ("fire"), tái [taj] ("peppery").
History
Up to the Spanish Conquest of the Americas in the 15th century, the Guaraní people didn't have a writing system. The first written texts in Guaraní were produced by Jesuit missionaries, using the Latin alphabet. The priest Antonio Ruíz de Montoya documented the language in his works Tesoro de la lengua guaraní (a Guaraní-Spanish dictionary, printed in 1639) and Arte y bocabvlario de la lengua guaraní (a grammar compendium and dictionary, printed in 1722) among others.
The alphabet and spelling used in those early books were somewhat inconsistent and substantially different from the modern ones. In 1867, Mariscal Francisco Solano López, president of Paraguay, convened a Script Council to regulate the writing; but the effort was not successful.
The script was finally standardized in its present form in 1950, at the Guaraní Language Congress in Montevideo, by initiative of Reinaldo Decoud Larrosa. The standards was influenced by the International Phonetic Alphabet notation, and it is now universally used in Paraguay.
Nonetheless, there is still some disagreement between literates on details of the standard. Some feel that the digraph "CH" should be changed to "X"; and that "G"-tilde should be replaced by plain "G", with the tilde being placed on one of the adjacent vowels.
The Guaraní name achegety is a neologism formed from a-che-ge (the names of the first three letters) and ty meaning "grouping", "ensemble".
Toponyms and proper names
There are many toponyms and some proper names derived from Guaraní in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil. These are usually written according to the Spanish and Portuguese systems, and their pronunciation has often changed considerably over the centuries, to the point that they may no longer be understood by Guarani speakers.