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

Consonant Inventory

	Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar/ Palatal consonant	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m /m/		n /n/
Plosive	p /p/, b /b/		t /t/, d /d/	c /tʃ/, ç /dʒ/	k /k/, ɡ /g/
Fricative	f /f/, v /v/	þ /θ/, ð /ð/	s /s/, z /z/	sx /ʃ/, zx /ʒ/	kx /x/	h /h/
Approximant	xw /ʍ/, w /w/		l /l/	j /j/
Flap			r /ɾ/

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.

kx represents /x/, a fricative sound that is not found in English, but is found in German (as the ach-laut, the sound written "ch" in words like "acht".

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). This sound is very similar to, but not exactly the same as, the sound of a t or d pronounced between two vowels in an unstressed syllable in American English (ex. "prattle" or "paddle").

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".

Vowels

Front		Neutral		Back
High	i	y		u
Mid	e	ø		o
Low	æ		ɑ

Shireroth's vowel system cannot be understood without understanding the concept of vowel harmony. Vowel harmony is a phonological process active in the language that restricts certain types of vowels from occuring together in a single word.

Shireroth's vowels are divided into three classes: front vowels, namely y ø and æ; back vowels, u o and å; and neutral vowels, i u and a, for a total of nine distinct vowels in the langauge. The principle of vowel harmony states that a single word may either contain front vowels but no back vowels, or back vowels but no front vowels. The central vowels do not participate in vowel harmony, and may occur in all types of words.

(In phonetics, the terms front, central and back are often used to describe vowels based on where in the mouth they are physically articulated. Clearly, the vowel harmony in Shireroth has its basis in the backness and frontness of the vowels, but that is not the whole story. i and e, for instance, are phonetically front vowels just like y and ø are, but the former are not affected by vowel harmony and the latter are. The Wikipedia article on vowel harmony gives a more in-depth overview of the linguistic concept, and provides examples of it occuring in several different languages. In fact, the vowel harmony processes in Finnish are quite similar to the ones in Shireroth, owing to their similar vowel inventories.)

While the writing system of English does a reasonably good job representing English's consonants in a straightforward manner, its ways of representing vowels are terrible, and there is no straightforward way of describing Shireroth's vowels in terms of written English vowels. Shireroth has exactly nine vowels written with exactly nine separate letters, and the ways that those letters are used in English should in no way influence a person trying to use them to write Shireroth. y represents a high front rounded vowel, which is not found in English. This is sound of Finnish yksi, or German über, or French tu. An English speaker can produce this sound by saying the vowel of see, and then rounding their lips without otherwise changing the way the pronounce the vowel. ø represents a mid front rounded vowel, which is also not found in English, but exists in Finnish and German in words like ön and Göbbels. A speaker of English can produce this sound by pronouncing an e and rounding their lips as if they were pronouncing an o or u. æ represents a low front unrounded vowel, found in English as the vowel sound of pat or cat. The Shireroth word ræd is pronounced almost like the English word rad. In Shireroth, unlike English, this sound can occur at the end of a word. i represents a high front unrounded vowel (here, "front" refers to a phonetic description of the vowel. It is not a "front" vowel for the purposes of vowel harmony). This is the sound of English pea or see, only not generally pronounced as long as the English vowel would be. e represents a mid front unrounded vowel which is neutral to vowel harmony. This vowel varies between the English vowel sounds of pen and pain - and so, we might expect a speaker of Shireroth to have difficulty with those two vowel sounds in English, and mix up words like pet and pain frequently until they were more comfortable with English's different vowel system. a represents a low central unrounded vowel. This is the vowel sound of the English words caught and cot for those who pronounce those two words identically (as do most speakers of American English west of the Rocky Mountains). It is neutral to vowel harmony. u represents a high back rounded vowel, similar to the English sound in lewd or sue. Some dialects of English pronounce this vowel noticably forward in the mouth, and round it less. This does not happen in Shireroth - the vowel u is always pronounced in the back of the mouth with rounded lips. o represents a mid back rounded vowel, somewhat similar to the English vowel in low or sew. Note that most dialects of English tend to pronounce this sound as a diphthong, which does not occur in Shireroth. å represents a low back unrounded vowel. Owing to vowel harmony, there are many suffixes in Shireroth which have two different forms - one with back vowels, one with front vowels - depending on whether the word the affix is attached to has front or back vowels. For instance, the suffix marking the accusative case is -æ for words with front vowels (so the accusative of ræd is rædæ), but -å for words with back vowels (so the accusative of sxun is sxunå). Suffixes like these which have vowels subject to change under vowel harmony are written like this: -æ/å.

(More on) Vowel Harmony

Some affixes which change under vowel harmony do not have pairs of front and back vowels, but instead pairs of neutral and back vowels. For instance, the affix marking the plural accusative is -e/å. For back vowel words, this means that the plural and singular accusatives are identical: sxun (nom), sxunå (acc sg/pl). But front vowel words consequently have different singular and plural accusatives: ræd (nom), rædæ (acc sg.), ræde (acc pl.).

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.

Syntax

Shireroth has Verb-Subject-Object (VSO) word order. More generally, Shireroth is typologically a head-initial language - that is, a language in which modifiers tend to come after the constituent they modify. So, in Shireroth adjectives follow nouns, genitives and relative clauses follow nouns, there are prepositions instead of postpositions, etc.

Vocabulary

At this time, only a very incomplete list, of course.