Stilio/Phonology
Snakes have vastly simplified mouths compared to human-being. We are capable of making every sound they make, though some are easier than others. Snakes have no lips. Their palate is occupied with the vomeronasal organ (Jacobson's organ), which acts as a sense of smell. Snakes have no uvula. Their glottis can move aside when eating large prey. They have no epiglottal region.
Sentient and non-sentient snakes hiss their entire volume of air without interruption, so a Parseltongue utterances cannot be longer than about fifteen seconds. Stops are typically initial, and in a verb. Whatever vocal-cords they are graced with by magic, snakes cannot speak very loudly or vary pitch beyond very low frequencies. Humans speaking above a whisper, voicing consonants and vowels, are something like "shouting barbarians" to the snakes we were allowed to interview.
Given snake anatomy, even with the aide of magic, Parseltongue
- has no labial consonants
- has no retroflex consonants
- has no palatal or alveolar-palatal consonants
- has no uvular or epiglottal consonants
- has no voiced consonants
- is all spoken in creaky-voice
- has no corarticulated consonants
- of the clicks, has only the dental and the lateral
- may begin an utterance with a stop, but they are unpleasant elsewhere in speech.
- (An exception to this is relative clauses, where verbs are still fronted as much as possible)
- allows all affricates (though typically only utterance initial or final)
- must end an utterance with a sibilant/fricative or - much less commonly - a vowel
- has ejective forms of the stops and affricates
There are two non-phonemic sounds that snakes are readily capable of making, the trilled 'r' and the glottal stop. However, /r/ is a highly erotic sound which no snake would make in polite company, and stopping the flow of air during an utterance is generally indicative of sickness or eating.
Consonants
| Consonants (IPA above, Romanization below) | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dental | Alveolar | Post-alveolar | Velar | Pharyngeal | Glottal | |||||||||||
| Central | Lateral | Central | Lateral | |||||||||||||
| Nasal | n̥ | ŋ̊ | ||||||||||||||
| n | ñ | |||||||||||||||
| Unaspirated Stop | t | k | ||||||||||||||
| d | g | |||||||||||||||
| Ejective Stop | t' | k' | ||||||||||||||
| t | k | |||||||||||||||
| Click/Tap | ǀ | ɾ | ǁ | |||||||||||||
| ¡ | ř | ¿ | ||||||||||||||
| Fricative | θ | s | ɬ | ʃ | x | ʟ̝̊ | ||||||||||
| ð | s | ł | š | x | l | |||||||||||
| Approximant | ɹ | l | ɰ | ɫ̥ | ħ | h | ||||||||||
| r | l | w | l | ħ | h | |||||||||||
Most English speakers round their lips anyway when saying word-initial /r/, and any /ʃ/, which snakes regard as quite irritating. For those unfamiliar with the sound /ɰ/, pronounce a 'w' but leave off the lip-rounding. The dental click (¡) is used in the English "tsk tsk tsk", while the lateral click (¿) is used to spur on a horse. The alveolar tap (ř) is found as the 'r' and 'l' of East Asian languages, or the 'd'-like sound in the middle of 'water'. The lateral fricative (ł) is found in Welsh but may be very unfamiliar to English-speakers elsewhere. The pharyngeal approximant (ħ) is a very raspy, rattling 'h'.
A history of Latin alphabet orthography has given rise to the system as presented in the tables. Some consonants are exactly the same as IPA notation: x s l ħ h. Others require some thought: n for /n̥/, ñ for /ŋ̊/, d for an unaspirated /t/, t for /t'/, g for unaspirated /k/, k for /k'/, ð for /θ/, š for /ʃ/ (like Czech), ł for /ɬ/, r for /ɹ/, ř for /ɾ/, and w for /ɰ/. The dental and lateral clicks receive non-letter symbols: ¡ ¿.
All affricate possibilities are realized in Parseltongue, though most are very rare. Parseltongue does not distinguish between affricate and non-affricate pairs, so the tie-bar is not commonly written, even in IPA. The possibilities are: dð ds dš dł gx tð ts tš tł kx.
h can make any preceding letter aspirated. Care must be taken not to aspirate d and g normally.
Allophony
- g/x/k/gx/kx + l > /ɫ/
- g/x/k/gx/kx + ł > /ʟ̝̊/
Vowels
| Vowels (IPA above, Romanization below) | ||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Front | Center | Back | ||||||||
| High | i | ɯ | ||||||||
| i | u | |||||||||
| Near-high | ɪ | |||||||||
| y | ||||||||||
| High-mid | e | ɤ | ||||||||
| e | o | |||||||||
| Low-mid | ɛ | ʌ | ||||||||
| ë | ü | |||||||||
| Near-low | æ | ɐ | ||||||||
| æ | a | |||||||||
The Parseltongue system of vowels consists of nine sounds. As with consonants, there is no lip-rounding. Hence, u means /ɯ/ and o means /ɤ/. English-speakers must remember to distinguish between i and y: y always functions as it does in the English "myth" or "system", while i always a "long 'e'".
Korean-speakers will have an advantage distinguishing e from ë from ü: 에 vs. 애 vs. 어.
The presence of diphthongs is disputed (see Phonotactics below).
Parseltongue uses most of the letters of the English alphabet, excepting for 'c', 'j', 'm', 'p', 'q', 'v' and 'z' (because 'f' and 'b' mark frontness and backness of underspecified vowels). Eleven non-ASCII symbols are also needed: ¡, ¿, ř, ë, æ, ü, ë, š, ł, ħ, and ð. In our notation, gemination is marked with ♊.
English speakers should take care to pronounce all the vowels carefully and no rush through unstressed syllables. Parseltongue has only one central vowel (a), which appears comparable to the English central vowel /ə/. They occur with the same frequency in speech, but care must be taken to not let any Parseltongue vowel become "reduced".
Vowel Harmony
Of the nine vowels of Parseltongue, 6 participate in vowel harmony. These vowels may be underspecified for frontness/backness or one of three heights. (There is no rounding in Parseltongue.) The three independent vowels have an assigned height but typically reduplicate themselves, overriding vowel harmony. Underspecified prefixes and suffixes are written with f/b respectively for frontness/backness and 1/2/3 respectively for height.
| Indep. | Front | Back | Height # |
|---|---|---|---|
| y | i | u | 1 |
| æ | e | o | 2 |
| a | ë | ü | 3 |
Phonotactics
Parseltongue can be extremely difficult to analyze phonotacticly. Even with enunciating as one would to a fool or simpleton, snakes never cease the continuous airstream. Syllable boundaries, therefore, are somewhat arbitrary. Snakes we interviewed regard this as an unimportant, human problem, akin to transcribing choking or sneezing. For our purposes, we should regard Parseltongue syllables as capable of having either a vowel or a fricative in the nucleus. The overwhelming majority of syllables are V, CV, or CVC. Like Estonian, Parseltongue distinguishes geminate consonants and vowels with a high degree of specificity. Under some analyses, there are three levels of gradation, but this is disputed and typically called a supersegmental feature. In our notation, doubling of any letter indicated gemination.
A fricative (in the onset or in the nucleus) may be long or short. A syllabic fricative may be preceded by a stop, and hence, part of an affricate. It may also be preceded by an approximant or another fricative. Open syllables, in this case, are common. A fricative, nasal, or approximant can be analyzed as the coda of a fricative-nucleus syllable.
If a vowel is the syllable nucleus, it may be preceded by a tap, click, either nasal, a stop (which may be preceded by a fricative), a fricative, an affricate (which may be preceded by a fricative) or an approximant (which may be preceded by a stop or a fricative). The coda of a vowel-nucleus syllable may be a nasal (which may be followed by a fricative), a fricative, l or h, or it may be left open. Clicks and taps may only follow an open, vowel-nucleus syllable.
Aesthetically, snakes find it distasteful to have stops or clicks in the middle of an utterance. Hence, while it would be possible through appropriate case use to have any word order, verbs almost always come first.
Accent is very hard to detect at times in Parseltongue. It appears that almost all words are emphasized on the first syllable, though pronouns tend to be enclitic. Unusually stress patterns are marked with an apostrophe herein (i.e. ' ).
- a is /a/ as in father
- æ is /æ/ as in fat
- b is a back vowel (i.e. u, o, ü, and sometimes a)
- c is not used
- d is /t/ as in stop (not the lack of a puff of air)
- ð is /θ/, English 'th' as in thin never they
- e is /e/ as in bet
- ë is /ɛ/ as in Scottish bet
- f is a front vowel (i.e. i, e, ë, and sometimes y and æ)
- g is /k/ as in skit (note the lack of a puff of air)
- ħ is /ħ/, a raspy and tight 'h'
- h is /h/ as in hat
- i is /i/ as in beet
- j is not used
- k is /k'/ as in a 'k' sound when beatboxing
- l is /l/ as in lamp, sometimes as in pull
- ł is /ɬ/ as in Welsh llwyd
- m is not used
- ñ is /ŋ/ as in sing, but in a whisper
- n is /n/ as in nun, but in a whisper
- o is /ɤ/ as in oil, but without the lip-rounding
- p is not used
- q is not used
- r is /ɹ/ as in furr (but not too far back down the throat)
- ř is /ɾ/ as in the middle consonant of water
- s is /s/ as in sass
- š is /ʃ/, English 'sh' as in shush
- t is /t'/ as in a 't' sound when beatboxing
- u is /ɯ/ as in suit, but without the lip-rounding
- ü is /ʌ/ as in aw, but without the lip-rounding
- v is not used
- w is /ɰ/ as in quick, but without the lip-rounding
- x is /x/ as in loch
- y is /ɪ/ as in bit
- z is not used
- ¡ is /ǀ/ as in 'tsk tsk'
- ¿ is /ǁ/ as in cajoling a horse
- ' means the next syllable gets the accent, not the first.
