Now that I'm working on Outlander, and since I want to start working on Hearthsider in the future, I decided I want to create a universal system for referring to yinrih speech sounds. Here is one candidate. Yinrih language is highly tonal. Plenty of Terran languages (Sino-Tibetan especially) like to refer to tones by number. So I've expanded this system to encompass not just tone, but all the features of a vowel. Consonants are indicated by letters (case insensative).

Vowels

Timing

1 short

2 long

3 early

4 late

5 overlong

Tone

1 low

2 high

3 rising

4 falling

5 peaking

6 dipping

Strength

1 weak

2 strong

3 strengthening

4 weakening

5 cresting

6 troughing

Phonation

1 whine

2 growl

3 grunt

4 plain hiss vowel

5 trilled hiss vowel

Consonants

h huff

c chuff

y yip

p plain hiss semivowel

t trilled hiss semivowel

The system meets my criterion of only containing ASCII characters, but it's not compact in the slightest. Just the word <rnqg> paw is <c1213h1112>.

Thoughts?