Piemonteis: The alphabet

The Piemonteis alphabet, in its classical writing style, is composed by twenty-five letters:

• the twenty-one letters of the Italian alphabet (or, the letters of the English alphabet with the exception of j, k, w, x, y);
• the letter j, used as a semi-vowel;
• the two additional vowels ë and ò;
• the additional consonant n- (which is a real single letter, even if, on a computer, it is written with two signs).

The sign - is also used on its own in certain constructs, like s-c and s-g (this last one often simplified into sg); generally speaking, it changes the pronounciation of the following or preceding letter, even if sometimes it is just a graphical separator (hyphen) in composed words.

The alphabetical order is the same as in Italian or English, adding ë just after e, n- just after n and ò just after o.

The other accented vowels are not letters in Piemonteis, but are used, exactly as in Italian, to indicate the tonic accent of the word; they can thus be written without the accent (if you're not picky) unless you are at the end of a word, or you want to prevent confusion. So, these signs can appear as tonic accents: à, è, ì e ù (ò, as said, is rather a specific letter, though it is usually always tonic); also used are the acute accents é e ó (that, phonetically, is an o and not an ò... this will be clearer after learning vowel pronounciations).

As we will see later, alternate writing styles are sometimes used; they include different characters, such as ô and ü, and they do not use ò as a separate letter. The one I use, however, is the most common and it is also the one that you will normally find in books and printed material.

Of course, now you still have to learn how to pronounce all these letters! (Actually, if you live in Western Europe, you already know all the sounds - you just need to match them to signs.)