(en)

I’m learning to use ALUPEC, a writing system for Cape Verdean Creole created by Manuel Veiga. I’m using it specifically for the Barlavento dialect of São Vicente. If you’re looking to learn more about ALUPEC, good resources include Manuel Veiga’s blog and alupec.kauberdi.org, which has a copy of its officialized rules.

This is a writing system that was designed mostly with a different dialect in mind, the Santiago dialects, for which it was to be relatively simple and phonetic, a sort of spelling reform of traditional phonetic spellings based on Portuguese orthography. (It was not the first attempt at this.) The São Vicente dialect is different in a number of ways that make it difficult to represent with the same spelling rules as for Santiago. So there are special rules for Barlavento dialects in ALUPEC. These rules also make Barlavento dialect spellings follow their etymology more than other dialects’ spellings.

The end result, in my opinion, seems a bit like a Frankenstein’s monster. (But I’m not a linguist, and my knowledge of Creole is imperfect.) It hasn’t been well received by native Barlavento speakers, from what I’ve heard.

There ends up being some ambiguity in how words are written vs. how they’re pronounced. For example, if you write debóxe, detá, and dezê, the accent marks give you some pronunciation clues, but they leave out something important if you’ve never heard the words spoken: the initial E’s have very different sounds, to the point of changing the number of syllables when an E doesn’t actually represent a sound at all! EDIT: removed former criticism of letter S, see below. So some of this ambiguity is a direct result of the combinations of rules chosen, and would be reduced if slightly different ones were used.

But a lot of that ambiguity is hard to avoid, without using a ton of accent marks, inventing new letters, or using a lot of apostrophes. I tend towards liking the apostrophes a little better, but I can see that they can seem more like an eye-dialect than a spelling system. Most every writing system has some ambiguity. By not trying too hard to unambiguously write the pronunciation, one can hope to have fewer ways to write the same word, letting multiple people pronounce them differently while writing them the same. That would be good for reading.

The system is definitely usable, and despite my criticisms I’m happy to be using it. I’ve been trying to get used to the rules and how they’re applied by writing in the language and translating things into it. I’m storing some of my thoughts, understandings, and questions on my ALUPEC Sonsénte page.

EDITED Jun 3: I realized I had misread the rules for the letter S, so I’ve removed my criticism of them and tried to softened my critical tone. I had thought that intervocalic S with the /z/ sound could be written as “s” in Barlavento ALUPEC, but apparently I’m wrong and those are changed to Z, which at first glance seems to make things cleaner.