Onyx Syllabic Splitting

Disclaimer: This page is part of the Onyx Spec, meaning it may be out of date and/or incomplete. See the notice here.

How Onyx splits words/outlines.

Onyx uses a regular outline grammar (you should read that page).

"Onyx Splitting" is a form of subsequent vowel omission with the addition of "pseudo-strokes".

A pseudo-stroke is a part of a stroke that acts as if it were a separate stroke used in combination with the rest of the stroke. Essentially, you're "squishing" multiple strokes into one, while keeping the exact same behavior.

* is used to split the final bank of a stroke into another pseudo-stroke. It's a pretty intuitive system, but it's different for each chord.

For example, the outline KO*EM translates to "coma". This outline essentially consists of the 3 banks K OE and *M. Here, KOE acts like a stroke, and *M as a pseudo-stroke. When * is used in pseudo-strokes, it should be dropped, and the final chord should be treated as an initial chord. Thus, this outline is equivalent to the outline KOE/PH. Because of the subsequent vowel omission, the subsequent vowel sound is left out.

A final chord can also be split into a stroke with chords in the initial and final banks, such as the stroke PA*FRPBG - where -FRPBG => /ŋk/ (see Onyx Layout and Raw Steno) - which effectively has the banks P, A, and *FRPBG, where *FRPBG is a pseudo-stroke equivalent to /TPH-K. By the same rules above, the /ŋk/ sound can be split into it's (roughly) equivalent initial and final sounds with TPH- and -K.