Most conlang examples I find in tutorials use a small set of vowels, but the one I'm working on has 13 and I'm having trouble finding the simplest transliteration to work with. Here are the IPA symbols:
Front | Back
---------|----------
[i] | [u]
[y] |
---------|---------
[e] | [o]
[ø] |
---------|---------
[aɛ̯] |
[œ] |
---------|---------
[a] | [ɑ]
---------|---------
[œ̃] | [õ]
[ã] |
My keyboard only allows me to type àâäùûüèêëéìîï but not œɛɑø or the diacritics used in the IPA for nasal vowels and diphthongs.
(EDIT: Note that my question really is all about the transliteration I'll be using for practical typing. Sure, I can just use fancy unicode symbols for my actual writing system in the end if I want to, but copypasting symbols isn't very practical for writing long texts.)
The language uses a (very simplified) subset of Quebec French for sound inventory, but I wanted to avoid using too many digraphs or diacritics which French relies on heavily. I know I can always come up with a custom font and writing system later on which brings in more glyphs for vowels, but I need something practical to use during conception.
I'd be interested if you have a generic answer as to what your own process is when you have a similar problem or a specific suggestion in my case.
My incomplete solution for now is this (updated to include jknappen's suggestion which I like for the German-style umlaut). I could add a macro to my text editor to allow for tildes, but I still need to figure out how I want to distinguish [œ] and [e] or [a] and [ɑ].
Front | Back
---------|----------
[i] /i/ | [u] /u/
[y] /ü/ |
---------|---------
[e] | [o] /o/
[ø] /ö/ |
---------|---------
[aɛ̯] /ä/ |
[œ] |
---------|---------
[a] /a/ | [ɑ]
---------|---------
[œ̃] | [õ]
[ã] |