Deleted

łaá siri (ASCII transcription lhaa: siri) is an minimalist artlang created by Zach Wellstood for personal use. Interesting characteristics include deictic verbal conjugation for the subject and object, a phonological inventory of 10 (or 13, depending on your view, or maybe more depending on other views) phonemes, and a 4-way system of animacy.

Phonetics & Phonology

Consonants

	Alveolar	Palatal	Glottal
Plosive			' [ʔ]
Fricative	s [s]
Lateral Fric.	ł [ɬ]
Lateral Aff.	tł [tɬ]
Approx.	r [ɹ] - l [l]	y [j]

A note of transcription: Typically, the symbols used above will be used by default. If a system doesn't support unicode, or you're in a rush, it's okay to transcribe <ł> as <lh> and <tł> as <tlh>.

Vowels

	Front	Back
Close	i [i] ii [iː] u [y] uu [yː]
Open		a [ɑ] aa [ɑː]

^1  This phoneme may be realized as [u] or [uː].

Vowel Qualities: Glottal Reinforcement

The presence of a coda with [ʔ] is referred to as "glottal reinforcement." All vowels can be reinforced with a glottal stop at the end. This will be transcribed <a'>, <aa'>, etc. All vowels/chronemes can take on this quality, but rhotic vowels cannot. If two glottal stops approach each other at syllable boundaries, they assimilate into a single phoneme.

Vowel Qualities: Rhotacization

The only other phoneme that can fill a syllable coda is /ɹ/. This is referred to as "rhotacization." English has rhotic vowels, as in waiter. Mandarin Chinese also has this. It's referred to in Mandarin as erhua, or "er-speech" and is represented orthographically using the syllable -er, 儿.

All vowels can be rhotacized except those that are glottaly reinforced. When this does occur, the vowel melds in with the /ɹ/ phoneme, and is articulated for roughly the length of a lengthened vowel. The IPA should reflect this change with the combining hook character: [ɑ˞] or [ɑ˞ː] for <ar> and <aar> respectively. For more on rhotacization, see the Wikipedia Page

Vowel Qualities: Length

Vowels that are transcribed twice (aa, ii, uu) contrast in length with their singular counterparts. It is generally acceptable to assume that a chroneme is held for roughly the equivalent of two vowels, thus /aa/ should be as long as /a/ + /a/. Vowel length is contrastive!

Example

latła [lɑ.tɬɑ]	łatłaa [ɬɑ.tɬɑː]
to move or shift position	big

Syllable Structure

Syllables are always in a CV{ʔ, ɹ} pattern. If there is ambiguity between syllables, a hyphen can be written for purely aesthetic reasons. The hyphen must be written between two syllables, not in the middle of one: CV-CV, rather than C-VCV. Additionally, rhotacized or reinforced vowels are considered a single unit to a speaker of łaá siri, so <ar> is different from <ra>, and that is why vowels can be r-colored without violating the phonosyntactic constrictions.

Colloquialisms

Because colloquialisms between languages are rarely mutually intelligible and often rooted in culture, the closest English equivalent to the succeeding phrases has been provided as well. This is often not a direct translation, but something that carries a similar connotation in English.

Literary łaá siri

Most prevalent in łaá siri are numerous constructions and names of constructions used in poetry. Because of the minimal phonetic inventory of vowels, rhyme is very common, but beyond acoustic properties of poetry are many metaphorical constructions.

Counting

łaá siri uses a base-5 (quinary) number system.