Caine orthography
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The Caine orthography (Bemé: Keyn romanisesh) is a phonemic orthography for writing Bemé originally developed by Charlie F. Caine, the US ambassador to the Poccasin Federation from 1961 to 1964, originally described in the . It is desginated as the official orthography for Bemé in the Poccasin Federation, and is also widely used in other Bemé-speaking regions, such as in Saint Columban. It is based on the Latin alphabet and in its official form uses no diacritics.
Background
Like many creole and pidgin languages, Bemé did not have a standardised orthography before Caine. During colonial times, English was used in all official contexts; this law still persists in the British-administered Saint Columban. In the few, informal cases where separate spellings were used for Bemé, these respellings were inconsistent and dependent on speaker; for example, wa could be written as ⟨wa⟩, ⟨what⟩ or ⟨wha⟩. For example, one version of The Lord's Prayer in Bemé before Caine was written as so:
We Abo ni sky, you name be bless.
You bemeh wone, you wone be done, ni ground bela sky.
Give oh we this day we day-day crumb, and solicing we badsin bla we solicin them e badsining we.
An no taking oh we ni temptashon by taking o we away badbad.
Amen.
As one can see, spelling is not internally consistent; even words with English cognates like an "and" (derived from and) is spelt ⟨and⟩ in one sentence and ⟨an⟩ in another, while temteshan "temptation" (derived from the same English word) is partially written in eye dialect as ⟨temptashon⟩.
The lack of standardised spelling was even more apparent in words that are of indigenous Poccasin origin, such as bela, which is originally from Ketaserang beela "agree"; in the extract alone bela is spelt variably as ⟨bela⟩ and ⟨bla⟩, but in other texts it could be written as ⟨bila⟩, ⟨bala⟩ or ⟨b'la⟩.
Charlie F. Caine
Charles Faulkner Caine was born on May 6, 1921