The many writing systems of Mansi: challenges in transcription and transliteration

The paper at hand presents the recently published COPIUS Orthographic Toolset’s Mansi module. This open-source software, part of the COPIUS drive to create necessary international infrastructures for teaching/learning and researching Uralic languages, allows for rule-based transcription between four basic writing systems historically used for Mansi: the Cyrillic alphabet, the Latin-based Unified Northern Alphabet (UNA), Finno-Ugric Transcription (FUT), and the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). The software aims to take variation in the usage of these respective writing systems into consideration as best possible in a purely rule-based approach currently lacking lexical support. Section 1 will give a short summary of the history of Mansi literacy and aims to elucidate how changing trends, both local and Russia-wide, influenced the manner in which Mansi was captured in writing by scientists and speakers throughout history. Section 2 will give an overview of (Northern) Mansi phonology and discuss how difficult aspects of it are handled in the writing systems under consideration. Finally, Section 3 will illustrate the transcription software, in its current version, in action, with a sample text transcribed from each of the four writing systems under consideration into the three other ones.