1: Phonology and Orthography

“You speak with me and I speak with you.”
—Sumerian Proverb

The first two things about a langauge one needs to learn are how you say it and how you write it.

Phonology

Sound Inventory

Tsal’s sound inventory consists of twenty-five consonants and five vowels, detailed in the following charts. The symbols in /slashes/ are the IPA representation of each sound. If you aren’t familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet or any particular sound, this site is a good place to hear the sound spoken. The characters in parentheses are used when writing the language using the Latin alphabet, with another single-character option if your input method can handle non-ASCII characters:

Consonants Labial Alveolar Postalveolar Palatal Velar
Voiceless Voiced Voiceless Voiced Voiceless Voiced Voiced Voiceless Voiced
Nasal /m/ /n/
Stop /p/ /b/ /t/ /d/ /k/ /g/
Fricative /s/ /z/ /ʃ/ (sh, š) /ʒ/ (zh, ž) /x/ /ɣ/ (xh, ǧ)
Affricate /ts/ (ṡ1) /dz/ (ż1) /tʃ/ (ch, č) /dʒ/ (j) /kx/ (q1)
Lateral Fricative /ɬ/ (lh, ł)
Trill /r̥/ (rh, ř) /r/
Approximant /l/ /j/ (y) /w/

(Yes, I romanize the /j/ sound as “y”. I am an English speaker.)

Vowels Front Mid Back
High /i/ /iː/ /u/ /uː/
Mid /e/ /eː/ /o/ /oː/
Low /a/ /aː/

(The long vowels like /aː/ are romanized with a macron “ā” or an h “ah”, depending on whether or not you can type macrons.)

Allophony

Certain sounds get realized differently in certain environments. This will just be a list of sound changes (and as such will assume more IPA knowlege), so I’ve compressed it in this easily skippable box:

List of Allophones

Syllable Structure and Timing

A syllable in Tsal looks like this:

Non-glide Consonant Glide Vowel Non-glide Consonant

The glides are the /j/ and /w/ sounds. Sounds italicized are optional. This means that a legal syllable in Tsal can be as simple as a single vowel /e/ or up to four phones long, like /kwon/. There is one additional restriction involving long vowels: If the vowel in a syllable is long, then that syllable may not have a final consonant. So while the syllable /kwon/ is legal, the syllable /kwoːn/ is not.

Different languages have different rules for the timing of syllables when spoken. English is a stress-timed language, where there is a (roughly) equal amount of time between one stressed syllable and the next (we’ll get to Tsal’s stress rules in a moment). A language like Spanish is syllable-timed, where every syllable is of equal length. Tsal, along with languages like Japanese, fall into the category of mora-timed languages.

The mora is the basic unit of timing in languages such as Tsal. Each syllable has some number of morae, and the rules for assigning the morae of a syllable are as follows:

Syllables worth one mora are called light and syllables with two morae are called heavy. This gives some context to the ban on syllables like /kwoːn/, since such a syllable would be worth three morae, and allowing such superheavy syllables is rare cross-linguistically. When Tsal is spoken, every mora is of equal length.

Morae inform Tsal’s rules for stress. If a word has at least one heavy syllable, stress goes on the last heavy syllable in the word. If there is no such syllable, stress goes on the second-to-last syllable. So, for example, the word xyeztyī has two heavy syllables, so the stress goes on the final syllable, tyī.

Orthography

Tsal’s writing system is an abugida, which gives consonants center stage and marks vowels with a diacritic. The script has twenty-four consonant characters:

Consonant Glyph Consonant Glyph Consonant Glyph
/p/ p /t/ t /k/ k
/b/ b /d/ d /g/ g
/m/ m /n/ n /s/ s
/z/ z /ts/ c /dz/ D
/l/ l /ɬ/ L /x/ x
/ɣ/ X /kx/ K /ʃ/ S
/ʒ/ Z /tʃ/ C /dʒ/ j
/r/ r /r̥/ R ∅ h


Vowels are written with a diacritic above the preceeding consonant. This is the reason the ∅ character exists, it serves as a carrier for vowels which would otherwise not have a consonant to attach to (here using /t/):
/ta/ /te/ /ti/ /to/ /tu/
ta te ti to tu

The glides /j/ and /w/ are written with single and double dots below the consonant preceeding it. For example, /kye/ and /kwe/ are written kye and kwe.

The character h also serves the purpose of marking long vowels. If you use this character without a vowel diacritic on top of it, the previous vowel becomes long: Compare /pe/ pe and /peː/ peh. Multiple characters are written with a single connecting line and the entire word is ended with a tick, as in eksampol. Final consonants are written exactly the same as other consonants, just without a vowel diacritic.

This orthography reflects the timing and syllable rules of the language: Each “character”, that is, a consonant and the diacritics attached to it, represents one mora. This is why the long-vowel mark acts similarly to a final consonant, as they both add one mora to the word.

The script also has a hyphen character, -, used in some word derivations and compounds. It’s not pronounced, but it is the exception to the one character one mora rule, as a mora may be fragmented across a hyphen, like in the sequence n-yi. It’s often possible to tell whether Tsal speakers conceive of something as a word in its own right or just a compound of two words based on whether or not the words are split by a hyphen or just concatenated. As such, compound words might lose their hyphens as they persist in the language or drift semantically.

The rest of the marks and symbols (such as numbers and punctuation), are best discussed later once more of the language is detailed, but one that will be used in examples is the sentence-terminator. The sentence-terminator is like the word-terminating tick, but two of them, as in Cal.

Footnotes

  1. The single-characters for the affricates /ts/, /dz/, and /kx/ are useful to show syllable structure information. For instance, the sequences romanized “xitsu” and “xiṡu” are different in that the former has one heavy and one light syllable, and the latter has two light syllables, meaning they are pronounced with different timing even though the clusters and their corresponding affricates are commonly phonetically identical. I don’t use this word-initially because using two characters for the affricate is unambiguous there. Plus, I’ve been spelling the language “Tsal” for five years and calling it “Ṡal” just feels wrong. ↩︎