Most of the characters derive from the Latin or
Greek alphabet, and from earlier systems such as
Dania. The consonants are primarily mono-phonemic symbols. Fine nuances in articulation can be distinguished by
diacritics (e.g. dots or tildes beneath or across the character). Vowels are distinguished with a more extensive system of diacritics. To describe the various dialectal sounds of the German letter "e", for example, the system uses the letter "e" with
trémas, upstrokes,
tildes and hooks below, separately and in combination. It is possible to write more than 500 different variants of the letter "e". There are a number of Teuthonista systems that use different base letters and diacritics, and the characters they have in common do not have defined values between systems. In Reichel (2003), the basic vowel letters are a e i o u. Vowels are stacked for an intermediate articulation (near-low vowels aͤ and aͦ, high-mid vowels iͤ and oͧ, central vowels uͥ and oͤ). Reduced vowels are ɪ ʊ ə α. Voiced consonants are written with a underdot or overdot, while devoiced consonants are written like the devoiced ones. The overall
consonant chart is as follows: and ẹ᪽, e᪷᪽ are only slightly raised and lowered e. Similarly,
ë and ẽ are rounded and nasalized e, while ë̈, ẽ̃ are extra-rounded and extra-nasalized e and ë᪻, ẽ᪻ are slightly rounded and nasalized e. Parentheses around a double diacritic, such as ë̈᪻, mean the degree of modification is intermediate between that indicated by a single and a double diacritic. An example of the shades of sound indicated by diacritics is the following scale from near-high to near-low front vowels: : ==Usage==