Armine
Armine
A language from the world of Vais, 4th from the sun of Faolain Alpha. Accessible through the Leanna Gate. Atail and Vais are the only known planets within the reach of current spacecraft; however, some other planets in the galaxy show signs of life.
Legend:
- parameter name
-
- [alternate parameter name]
- explanation
- english
-
- English
- Armine, Armeian.
- native
- Armeisughol.
- Planet
- Vais
- Galaxy
- Arfholin
- speakers
- Due to the widespread propagation of the Armine Solthain Empire throughout history, there are now approximately 950,000,000 total speakers of Armine, especially impressive given the language's large phonemic inventory and complex grammar. This is said to be due to the Empire's excellent education system. Around 780 million speak Armine at a native or near-native level,
- family
- It is a Vaisan language, the languages of Vais.
- branch
- Merumannic, the languages native to the Meruman continent
- subbranch
- Terchitic, The languages of the ethnic groups native to the land where the Solthain Empire was founded
- word-order
-
- wordorder
- Verb Subject Object (VSO), like the Gaelic/Celtic languages of Earth
- date
- This language was created in 2009 by Willis Meine (me). This template was ripped off from Andrew Wood.
Romanized Orthography
The native script used to represent Armine is alien, and while it is a relatively simple and effective writing system, many casual readers will not have the time to memorize all the symbols. It will be explained in on of the last sections of this article. As a result of this complexity, a system of romanization is employed throughout this book alongside the original script to allow the reader to recognize the general phonetic structure of words. Due to the inadequacies of the Roman alphabet in transliterating some of the phonemes (meaningful sounds) in Armine, various diacritics and special characters are used in the romanization. Additionally, other characters are necessary to get rid of ambiguities present: the apostrophe is used in the RA to separate dissyllabic vowel combinations which might otherwise be interpreted as diphthongs, e.g., a’i [a.i] versus ai [ai], and the hyphen is used to separate elided prefixes before vowel initial words, as in n-arox (na+arox) and prosthesis of consonants used in inflection of vowel-initial nouns and adjectives, as in t-ödanc (ödanc + t prefix). These phenomena will be discussed later.
Phonology
Armine has a massive phonemic inventory even for an alien language, standing at 96 consonants and 20 vowels. This is mostly due to the Armei people's famously keen sense of hearing. Even at low volumes, they can pick out the smallest sonic details, making the task of distinguishing phonemes inherently easier for them. These phonemes are illustrated by place and manner of articulation in the below using a special romanized orthography. Consonant Inventory
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1. No distinction is made between dental and alveolar stops, and while most speakers normally use the dental pronunciations [d̪],[ t̪], [n̪], these consonants may still have alveolar allophones [d], [t], [n], especially when next to consonants that are normally alveolar such as s, z, l, r ~ see Allophonic Distinctions 2. These phonemes are very unusual. Both of them are slack voiced fricatives with simultaneous nareal frication. IPA [β̥͋] and [γ̥͋]. 3. This series of phonemes may actually be advanced to a “post-palatal” place of articulation, especially by humans and non-native speakers. 4. The usual bilabial realizations of [w],[ʍ] are in free variation with the labiodentals [ʋ],[ʋ̥].
Vocalic Inventory
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(Author's Note: I'm aware that my tables look like ass, but there's not much I can do about it now. I have no experience in advanced wiki coding and had to test several different html-to-wiki conversion algorithms before I got something even remotely readable. I'll try to hand edit it later.)
