Taalen

A priori conlang of tree-dwelling humans in a magical trilunar world. Polysynthetic.

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!

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 dental approximant is the standard English <r>, and the dental flap can be heard in English words like <water> /wa4.r=/. Note also the presence of a syllabic resonant

	Bilabial	Labiodental	Dental	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive	/p/ /b/			/t/ /d/		/c/	/k/ /g/
Nasal	/m_0/ /m/			/n_0/ /n/			/N_0/ /N/
Fricative	/p\/ /B/	/f/ /v/	/T/ /D/	/s/	/S/	/C/	/x/ /G/	/h/
Approx.		/w/		/r\/		/j/
Tap				/4/
Lat. App.				/l/
Lat. Fric.				/K/ /K\/

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/ /{/	/V/ or /@/
Open	/a/		/Q/

Diphthongs

Taalen only possesses five diphthongs, all rising: /aI/ /eI/ /oI/ /aU/ and /oU/.

Orthography

In general, the phonemes of Taalen are represented in romanisation by their obvious counterparts: <t> is /t/. Exceptions:

Rom.	PR		Rom.	PR		Rom.	PR
ts	/c/		c	/k/		mh	/m_0/
nh	/n_0/		f	/f/ or /p\/	v	/v/ or /B/
th	/T/		dh	/D/		sh	/S/
h	/h/, /C/ or /x/		gh	/G/		u	/u/ or /w/
r	/4/ or /r\/		lh	/K/ or /K\/