Phonemes and Orthography
Flint, in his transcription of the various Aboriginal languages, has, in general, employed IPA symbols. We have transliterated Flint's original transcriptions into orthographies which employ letters of the Roman alphabet. As far as possible, these orthographies are based on the modern practical orthography used in publications such as Kirton & Charlie (1996). However, Flint's transcriptions tend to require a greater range of symbols than is provided by standard orthographies, because they tend to be phonetic, rather than phonemic. This is particularly true for vowels: it has been necessary to use both lower-case and upper-case letters to represent the range of vowels recorded by Flint. For every language, a table of correlations sets out the correspondences between the IPA symbols used by Flint for that language, and the orthographic symbols that we are using to represent them. The table of correlations is found in the "Phonemes and Orthography" section for each language. The IPA font used is SIL Doulos (SIL IPA93 Fonts 2.0 version). SIL Doulos is one of the SIL Encore IPA font families developed by the Summer Institute of Linguistics.
Flint makes some use of diacritics. These are generally not included in the transcription of a word (in the \ft field). Instead, they are mentioned in the word's \ncft (comments on the transcription) field.
In Flint's original transcription, vowels may be followed by a colon, to indicate lengthening. In the practical orthographies employed here, vowel lengthening is indicated by double letters. Therefore a: in Flint's original transcription would be written as aa in practical orthography.
In Flint's original transcription, primary stress is indicated by a superscript dash and secondary stress is indicated by a subscript dash. In the orthography used here, primary stress is indicated by a double inverted comma, and secondary stress is indicated by a single inverted comma (except for Yanyula, where primary stress is indicated by a single inverted comma, and secondary stress is not shown).