Taalen

Taalen
Spoken in:	currently unnamed Realm
Timeline/Universe:	Plasm
Total speakers:	2.8 million (or something)
Genealogical classification:	Currently undecided

Pronounced /'tQ.lEn/.
From tal 'tree' + ra 'speak' + -en agentive suffix: 'Treespeaker', used metonymically. If compounded currently instead of anciently, this results in tallen, which is used to indicate the individual Treespeaker (roughly equivalent to a shaman) as opposed to the language.

Taalen is spoken in a trilunar Realm of the Plasm, the Otherworld common in the Tell's mythology. The Tell is this world, here, separated from the Plasm by the Caesura, a mystical veil. More to come...

History

External

I started working on Taalen in the summer of 2000. Anticipating grad school, and unhappy with where Aelya was going, I started over. There's a lot of Aelya's aesthetic in Taalen - one might say that Aelya evolved into Taalen, but not definitely not in a diachronic way!

It has been heavily inspired by the Celtic and Uralic languages, as well as Native American languages of various families.

Internal

There will be a proto-language and sister languages, but nothing has been developed in any detail yet.

Phonology

Consonants

Taalen's phonetic inventory is fairly simple, and should be familiar to any English speaker, with a few exceptions. The voiceless nasals, bilabial fricatives as well as palatal and velar fricatives, and the lateral fricatives are likely familiar from languages such as Welsh, Japanese, and German. The palatal plosive is unusual, and most easily approximated by English speakers with /ts/. The alveolar approximant is the standard English <r>. Note also the presence of syllabic resonants.

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive	/p/ /b/			/t/ /d/		/c/	/k/ /g/
Nasal	/m_0/ /m/			/n_0/ /n/			/N/
Fricative		/f/ /v/	/T/ /D/	/s/	/S/		/G/	/h/
Approx.		/w/		/r\/		/j/
Lat. App.				/l/
Lat. Fric.				/K/

As in English, the voiceless stops are usually aspirated (/p_h t_h k_h/) initially, but also when geminate.

Some resonants may also be syllabic: /m=/ /n=/ /r\=/ /l=/ as in <bottom>, <button>, <butter>, and <bottle>.

Vowels

Basic description/intro will be here.

	Front	Central	Back
Close	/i/ /I/		/U/ /u/
Close-mid	/e/ /2/		/o/
Open-mid	/E/ /{/	/@/
Open	/a/		/A/

Diphthongs

Taalen possesses seven diphthongs, all falling: /aI eI oI @I aU oU @U/.

Allophones

• [C] and [x] are allophonic variants of /h/, the former appearing only near a front vowel, and the latter before a consonant or finally.
• /f/ appears as [p\], and /v/ as [B], in free variation.
• /K/ and [K\] also appear in free variation.
• /r\/ appears initially and finally, while [4] appears intervocalically and after a consonant. Neither ever appears before a consonant.
• [V] alternates with /@/ in stressed syllables.

Mutation

Taalen is rich in mutation, partly a result of its polysynthetic typology. There are three primary types of mutation, lenition, nasaliszation, and vocalization. None of the mutations are strictly grammatical in nature, instead resulting from the morphophonology. Because of the nature of some morphemes, it can be difficult to see this, as the surface realization of a particular marker might only be mutation in the majority of cases.

Lenition

Historically, lenition arose most often from /s S/ + stop intervocalically and from geminate stops. It also arose in syllabic codae, but only on stops. It creates fricatives from stops, nasals are unvoiced, and fricatives tend to be weakened to approximants.

p -> ph /f/	b -> bh /v/	m -> mh /m_0/	f -> 0	v -> u /U/
t -> th /T/	d -> dh /D/	n -> nh /n_0/	th -> h /h/	dh -> y /j/
c -> h /h/	g -> gh /G/	h -> 0	gh -> y /j/
s -> sh /S/	sh -> h /h/	l -> lh /K/

Nasalization

Arising from nasal assimilation, nasalization mutates unvoiced stops into voiced stops, and voiced stops into nasals.

p -> b /b/	t -> d /d/	c -> g /g/
b -> m /m/	d -> n /n/	g -> ngh /N/

Vocalization

The most common (and most complex) mutation, vocalization is the primary means by which medial clusters are simplified in Taalen. In addition to voiced consonants becoming vowels, unvoiced consonants simplify or cause other changes. Some vowels arise simply as a result of compensatory lengthening, which is not technically vocalization, but has been classed as such by the Elders. In a similar vein, some consonants do not vocalize, but aspirate or otherwise mutate, and these are classed as vocalization mutations as well.

The diphthong-rich vocabulary of Taalen owes much of it's existence to this mutation historically. Because it is so complex, and not yet fully understood, here are some characteristic examples with (as yet) meaningless syllables:

• rag- 'to carry' + -de RES = raede /r\@I.dE/ : stative verb 'to be borne, carried'
• rad- + -de = raide /r\aI.dE/
• rab- + -de = raude /r\aU.dE/
• rab- + -da = raoda /r\@U.d@/
• dol + glas = doughlas /doU.Glas/
• tam + bran = taubran /taU.b4@n/
• tas + bran = taafran /tA.fr@n/
• sar + los = saalos /sA.los/

Phonotactics

Syllabic onsets may consist of any consonant, in addition to the following clusters:

• voiced stops + liquids: /b4 bl d4 dl g4 gl/
• /s/ + voiceless stop: /st sp sc/
• stop + glide: /pj bj tj dj kj gj/
• nasal + glide: /nj Nj mw Nw/ (*/nw mj/ are not allowed)
• /sr sv lj/

Syllabic nuclei consist of a single vowel or diphthong. Vowels cannot remain in hiatus (*/aE/) but instead become a diphthong or introduce a glide: */i@/ -> /ij@/. The lax vowels /I U {/ cannot appear without a coda.

The coda of a syllable can only be a continuant (excluding voiceless nasals and glides) or null. Immediately preceding an onset cluster, no coda is allowed. In compounding, codae often vocalize before a cluster: /tam/ + /bran/ -> /taUbr@n/ (with unstressed /a/ -> /@/). Geminate consonants (with onset in the coda of one syllable and release in the onset of the next) are therefore limited to continuants (liquids, voiced nasals, and fricatives).

Cross-syllable (i.e. medial) clusters are limited.

• nasal + homorganic voiced stop: /mb nd Ng/
• nasal + glide: /nj Nj mw Nw/
• /l/ + voiced stop: /lb ld lg/
• /l/ + heterorganic nasal: /lm lN/
• liquid + glide: /lj lw rj rw/
• /K/ + voiceless stop: /Kp Kt Kk/
• certain fricative + liquid clusters: /f4 v4 T4 D4 S4 x4 G4 Tl Dl/
• sibilant + voiceless stop: /sp st sk Sp St Sk/
• fricative + homorganic glide: /Cj xw/
• /h/ + voiceless stop: /hp ht hk/

Syllables are therefore ON, NC, or ONC, where O is onset, N is nucleus, and C is coda. Words tend to be 3 syllables or less.

Orthography

	Phoneme	Romanization
Stops	/p t k b d g/	p t c b d g
Nasals	/m m_0 n n_0 N/	m mh n nh ngh
Fricatives	/f v T D s S G h/	f v th dh s sh gh h
Sonorants	/w r\ j l K/	u r y l lh
Vowels	/i I U u e 2 o E { @ a A/	i y u u e eu o e ea y a aa
Diphthongs	/aI eI oI @I aU oU @U/	ai ei oe ae au ou ao

The letter y is also used to mark syllabicity on the four resonants: yn = /n=/, ym = /m=/, yr = /r\=/, and yl = /l=/. It is also used to indicate /@/, as can the simple vowels in unstressed syllables.

The digraph ch does not appear, replaced in mutation by h. Ngh is only used outside of a cluster; when in a cluster, it is represented in romanisation by n: /Ng/ = ng.

Because Taalen does not allow stops finally, stems or words ending in stops aspirate them, and mark them with ' to indicate their origins:

ragh /'r\aG/ 'mist'	ragha /'r\a.G@/ 'mists'
rag'h /'r\aG/ 'he carries'	ragen /'r\a.gEn/ 'I carry'

Geminate consonants (such as ll /l:/) are generally represented by doubling. In the native writing system, a special symbol is used for this (as well as in aa). The geminate digraphs are represented by tth, ddh, ggh, nng, ssh, and llh, (ph and bh only appear as the result of mutation, and thus won't appear geminated).