Parseltongue
| Parseltongue-inspired | |
|---|---|
| Pronounced: | n.a. |
| Timeline and Universe: | Harry Potter world |
| Species: | Ophidic (snakes and snake-likes) |
| Spoken: | All over the HP world |
| Total speakers: | unknown |
| Writing system: | n.a. |
| Genealogy: | Isolate |
| Typology | |
| Morphological type: | Inflecting |
| Morphosyntactic alignment: | Accusative |
| Basic word order: | SOV |
| Credits | |
| Creator: | Eugene Oh |
| Created: | July 2005 |
Parseltongue is a fictional language spoken by snakes in the Harry Potter series of novels (author: J. K. Rowling), whose known human speakers include the Lord Voldemort and Harry Potter. This language has, however, not been publicly described by Rowling and has no known form.
The Parseltongue referred to below in this article refers to Parseltongue-inspired, a hypothetical form of the abovementioned snake-speak. Because the tongue has no written form, the text samples appearing hereafter are in romanised form.
Phonology
Consonants
Being a language spoken by snakes and the like, Parseltongue, while having the complete basic plosive repertoire (p/b, t/d, k/g), is rich in sibilants and other fricatives, which occur at a far higher frequency. Plosives also assimilate frequently to neighbouring fricatives or sonorants.
| Consonants | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bilabial | Labiodental | Alveolar | Post-alv. | Velar | Glottal | |||||||
| Nasal | m | n | ||||||||||
| Plosive | p | b | t | d | k | g | ||||||
| Fricative | f | v | s | tʃ | h | |||||||
| Affricate | ts | dz | ||||||||||
| Approximants | ʍ | w | ||||||||||
| Trill | r | |||||||||||
| Lateral Approximant | l | |||||||||||
Assimilation
Due to the inherent tendency of snakes (and hence their human inheritors of Parsetongue) to fricativise sounds, plosives commonly assimilate to neighbouring continuants, even across word boundaries, except where plosives are geminate. Regressive assimilation is the most common, and changes of the following types have been observed:
- t + f = ff
- t + s = ss
- t (+ vowel) + h' = th or θ
The velar plosives exhibit a slightly irregular pattern of fricativisation, and examples as illustrated below have been noted:
- k/k (i.e. across word boundaries) = χ
- g is frequently elided
With sonorants, devoicing frequently occurs before a fricative:
- m + h = devoiced m
- r + h = devoiced r or hr
- See also [[{{{1}}}]] for more information
