User:Con quesa/shireroth conlang

This is a public scratch pad for the Shireroth language. The official version thereof, once created and decided upon, will appear on another page in this wiki.

In this grammar sketch, italic text is used to indicate romanized text in Shireroth (or sometimes to indicate English text used to illustrate a linguistic feature of Shireroth). Bold text is used to indicate linguistic terms that may need further definition.

Phonology

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar/ Palatal consonant	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m		n
Plosive	p /p/, b /b/		t /t/, d /d/	c /tʃ/, ç /dʒ/	k /k/, ɡ /g/
Fricative	f /f/, v /v/		s	(ʃ)		h
Approximant	ʋ		l	j
Trill			r

In this table, the consonants are written how they are in the standard romanization, rather than using the International Phonetic Alphabet or another linguistic transcription system (ex. xw would be more properly transcribed as /w̥/, sx more properly transcribed as /ʃ/). Some consonants are written as digraphs, i.e. two separate letters treated as a single unit and used to indicate one sound. The specific letters used have been chosen such that there is no potential for ambiguity between two letters meant to indicate a single sound and two letters representing two separate sounds.

Whenever two consonants appear in a single cell, the one on the left is voiceless (pronounced without vibration of the vocal cords), and the one on the right is voiced (pronounced with vibration of the vocal cords). In English, voicing is the difference between the initial consonants in fine (voiceless) and vine (voiced), or between the final sounds in house used as a noun, and house used as a verb.

p b t d k and g are all sounds found in English, and an English speaker should have no problem dealing with the equivalent sounds found in Shireroth. f v s z and h are also sounds common to both Shireroth and English. Note that in written English voiced sounds are sometimes written the same way as their equivalent voiced sounds - we can see this in house used above, where the final s may represent either a /s/ sound or a /z/ sound. This does not happen in Shireroth - a s always represents an /s/, and a z　always represenents a /z/ (we would expect a Shireroth speaker, therefore, to write that English word as house and houze, until he was taught the complexities of English's writing system).

þ and ð represent the voiceless and voiced versions of the fricative sound normally written in English as th, as in thin. The initial sound of thin, in fact, is a voiceless th, and would be written in Shireroth as þin. In English, the voiced version of that sound also written with a th, as in the pronoun them. Shireroth, unlike English, writes these two sounds differently; if them were a Shireroth word, it would be written ðem.

c and ç represent the sounds that are more traditionally written in English as ch and j, IPA /tʃ/ and /dʒ/. These sounds are written in the Stops row of the table above for convenience, but they are more accurately affricates, which may be thought of as sounds that are a combination of a stop and it's corresponding fricative. This use of the letters c and ç to write these sounds is precisely the opposite of how Turkish writes those same sounds (i.e. a Shireroth c corresponds to a Turkish ç, and vice-versa).

sx and zx represent the sounds written in English as sh, and its voiced equivalent. The voiceless version of the sound appears in words like ship, while the voiced version is the initial sound of the second syllable in words like pleasure or leisure.

r in Shireroth represents a sound not found in English, a tapped r. This sound is found in Spanish (r as opposed to rr).

j is used, as in German, to indicate the consonant sound normally written in English as y, as in yes or yellow (which a Shireroth speaker would want to write as jes and jelo).

xw is a voiceless w, IPA /w̥/, pronounced similarly to how some British speakers of English would pronounce the initial wh of what or which (as opposed to witch). w is the voiced version of this same sound, and is pronounced identically to the English sound written as w in words like win and worry.

Nominnal Morphology

Shireroth nouns are declined for four cases, the nominative, accusative, genitive and prepositional. Nouns are also divided into two genders, which are generally arbitrary.