A Grammar of the Yoruba Language

The five vowels, a, e, i, o, u, represent the sounds usually termed Italian, as heard in the words—

There are also two modified vowels and two diphthongs—
ẹ, a sound between the sounds of bat and bait, hardly distinguishable by an English ear from the latter sound; approximating closely to the English interrogative aye? or the German ä, Fathers.
ọ, a sound between a and o, as heard in law, water, bought, not; represented in Swedish by å.
ai, nearly equivalent to the English i, in mile.
oi, as in voice.

Among the consonants it is only necessary to notice that—
g is always hard, as in gate.
j is always soft, as in join.
h has always its distinct sound, as an aspirate.
p = kp—the hard sound, to which gb is the soft correlative.
ṣ = sh.

Of the accents, none are employed, as in English, merely to mark the stress to be laid on a particular syllable.
The circumflex usually indicates a contraction, which is also in all cases a long syllable, e. g. DÂBOBO, from da-abo-bo.
The acute (´) and grave (`) accents are simply marks of intonation—i. e. of the rise or fall of the voice—often, as in the Chinese language, affecting the signification.

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Words not divided by a hyphen are uncompounded roots, or words, whose etymology is uncertain.
When a word is compounded without any change of the simple, it is merely divided by a hyphen into its component parts.
When there is such a change, an analysis is added of the whole word; e. g. IFORIBALẸ (fi-ori-ba-ilẹ); or of the syllable which needs elucidation, e. g. AṢẸNNU-ENNI (ṣe-ennu—).