[Ryl] Meanwhile, Back on Ryloth....
(pretend there's one of those Star Wars-style screen wipes here) I did a bit more work on Ryl today. For one, I decided that it should have a Subject-Object-Verb order, like German and Japanese. As opposed to English' Subject-Verb-Object. I may also include V2 verb syntax, like in German, but the jury's still out on that.
On a side note, and in a marked contrast with Esti, I'm finding the desire to make Ryl linguistically interesting is outweighing my desire to keep it simple and easy to learn. Anyway, I thought about Twi'leks, and Twi'lek culture, and decided that the verb should go after the subject and the object, and that whatever marker negates a verb (i.e., not doing the verb) goes after the verb. That way, if a speaker sees their audience doesn't like what they're saying, they can add "not" after the verb and pretend like they meant the opposite all along.
The big thing I did was finish the consonants. As I mentioned in the first Ryl post, I based them on French because The Clone Wars gave Twi'leks a French accent, allegedly at George Lucas' urging. The chart in that post was just French; this one (1) incorporates phonemes from Extant Ryl (that is, the list of existing Ryl words at Wookieepedia, hereafter ER) that don't exist in French, like /h/, (2) regularizes the orthography for writing Ryl in the English alphabet, and (3) adds explanatory notes.
The notes got rather long, so I put them below the fold.
On a side note, and in a marked contrast with Esti, I'm finding the desire to make Ryl linguistically interesting is outweighing my desire to keep it simple and easy to learn. Anyway, I thought about Twi'leks, and Twi'lek culture, and decided that the verb should go after the subject and the object, and that whatever marker negates a verb (i.e., not doing the verb) goes after the verb. That way, if a speaker sees their audience doesn't like what they're saying, they can add "not" after the verb and pretend like they meant the opposite all along.
The big thing I did was finish the consonants. As I mentioned in the first Ryl post, I based them on French because The Clone Wars gave Twi'leks a French accent, allegedly at George Lucas' urging. The chart in that post was just French; this one (1) incorporates phonemes from Extant Ryl (that is, the list of existing Ryl words at Wookieepedia, hereafter ER) that don't exist in French, like /h/, (2) regularizes the orthography for writing Ryl in the English alphabet, and (3) adds explanatory notes.
The notes got rather long, so I put them below the fold.
- m, p, b, f, v, s, z, sh, k, g, w, wh, h: these are the same as in English.
- n, t, d, l: as in French, these are denti-alveolar. (French speakers: I know I'm oversimplifying) Position the tip of the tongue behind the upper front teeth.
- dh, th: in English both /ð/ and /θ/ are written "th" (it's the difference between this and thistle). I substituted "dh" for /ð/ to make it easier to distinguish them. Honestly, I don't know why we don't do this in English.
- ch: the whole Affricate row is borrowed from Japanese (although French used to have /ts/ until a couple hundred years ago, and now has some foreign loanwords with ch). Some Ryl words had "ch", which in French usually means /ʃ/ ("sh" in English), but other Ryl words had "sh", so I couldn't just use the French style. I used the Japanese /tɕ/ instead of the English /tʃ/ because I thought it sounded more French-ish, and because I was also stealing /ts/ anyway. The difference is that the tongue isn't bunched up. If you click on the link there's an audio clip for each sound in the right-hand box.
- ts, ds: these don't usually occur in English but they sound exactly like they look. /ts/ shows up in Japanese a lot, so if you're into anime you've probably already heard it (If you've watched Rosario + Vampire you've heard it about every 30 seconds).
- ti (/ʒ/): this is a softened "z". It shows up in a few English words like equation, pleasure, vision, and beige. (I originally was going to use "zh" for this, but changed my mind to make it more French. It's still "zh" on the chart, but I'll fix that eventually.)
- j (/j/), nj (/ɲ/), uj (/ɥ/): the English "j" (/dʒ/) isn't used. As in French and German, "j" indicates a "y" sound (/j/). This extends to the digraphs "nj" and "uj". /ɲ/ is an "ny" sound. I originally planned to spell it "ñ" as in Spanish, but I ran into trouble when I started transliterating stuff into aurebesh, which doesn't have any diacritics. I could have gone with the French "gn", but I thought using "nj" would help people remember that /j/ isn't an English "j".
- c (/x/): this is the "ch" in loch, not the English "x". I included it because it was on the French consonant chart, even though it only occurs in loanwords. Later as I was looking over the ER words, I noticed that a few ended in -c rather than -k, and decided to use this phoneme for the -c ending.
- r (/ʁ/): the Guttural R or French R is a complex topic. For simplicity's sake I'm boiling it down to the [ʁ] sound that is the most common pronunciation in French media. It's usually a fricative, but is sometimes softened to an approximant. I haven't come up with a rule yet for when that happens in Ryl; I imagine it'll grow organically out of trying to pronounce words.
- rr (/R/): I wanted to include a trill in Ryl, because Twi'leks are sexy and trills are sexy. Because Aayla Secura's voice actor was Québécois, I looked at how trills are used in Québécois French, and settled on the uvular trill.
- ' (/ʔ/): look, don't blame me for the apostrophes. They were there already. :p In most conlangs that use them, they're interpreted as glottal stops. French doesn't have glottals, but I needed to include /h/ because it appears in ER, so if I'm adding one glottal, why not another? Glottal stop it is.