Xsat Phonotactics
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How the phonation abilities of reptiles affect the structure of a polysynthetic language
This public article was written by [Deactivated User], and last updated on 24 Jun 2023, 14:12.
[comments] xtaphonotacticsphonologydragonnonhuman
1. Xsat Phonotactics
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2. Xsat Verb Template
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This article is a work in progress! Check back later in case any changes have occurred.
This article is a work in progress! Check back later in case any changes have occurred.
Yo!
So, looking at Xsat words, you might have noticed that something seems up. Or not. It honestly isn't that recognizable at first, though it gets easier to tell once you look at the script. The phonotactics of Xsat are weird.
And that's easy to explain - it's a language spoken by dragons. The IPA transcriptions on most Xsat pages are just human approximations. So, first I'll explain how the phonotactics work from a human perspective, then shift to reptiles to explain why that is. The main things that might jump out at you are the extremely long clusters of obstruents inside words. That's not abnormal, but it's almost always fricatives and affricates. In fact, many words don't even have vowels. That's because fricatives (and by extension, the secondary part of affricates) are syllabary in Xsat. Humans don't pronounce every fricative as the nucleus of a syllable, but they absolutely could and it wouldn't be incorrect.
The second thing is the stops. The stops appear pretty rarely, and always after a non-stop sound. That's because stops can only appear in the coda of a syllable, and always appear at the end of any free morpheme. By far the most common one is the glottal stop, which appears at the end of most free morphemes, but sometimes disappears when those morphemes are incorporated into a larger word.
Okay, now to explain why all of this is. The "fricatives" in human Xsat are actually hisses in Ixkan Xsat, or breaths of air outwards, obstructed by the tongue vibrating extremely fast at some point in the mouth. So, actually more like a really really fast trill. The vowels are the same, just without any vibration. So, both vowels and fricatives require the mouth to be open to some degree, without any change in the openness of the mouth between them. So, why distinguish them? The dragons view fricatives, affricates, and vowels all as the same group, dubbed "syllabics".
The stops, however, are not true stops at all, but percussives. That is, they are sounds produced whenever the mouth closes, with most of the "stops" being produced by a set of teeth colliding, and the "glottal stop" being marked only by the lack of airflow (because the mouth is closed).
For this reason, the phonotactics of Ixkan Xsat were analyzed in "breaths", or unlimited-length unbroken sequences of vowels and hisses, ending with a percussive.
The oddly contrastive orthography reflects this; each breath in a word is written as a singular unit, separated from the others by the stop glyphs. Therefore, it is easy to break up a Xsat word into breaths when written in Rcukr'. E.X.
q́hscxzlslskx’ax
xa’xkslslzxcshaq
"You'd better get there early tomorrow"
In this word, you can clearly see the three breaths, '́x xa', kx xk, and q́hscxzlsls slslzxcshaq.
When the sounds were adopted for human speech, the Saitx turned the hisses into fricatives, the percussives into stops, and the last one into the glottal stop, since they're quite literally the same, except humans can do it while keeping their mouth open.
This is the reason for Xsat's weird phonotactics; every word, by necessity, ends in a stop, and no word can begin with one. Meanwhile, syllables don't exist, and you can tack as many non-stop consonants in a row as you want, assuming you can comfortably handle it.
As you can imagine, however, this does significantly impact the structure of the language, even more so than it would for a less synthetic language.
Since all free morphemes necessarily end with a stop, all modification to a root is done with prefixing or infixing (there's really no infixing, just stem variation based on some syntactic qualities, which appears like infixing when viewed on a table). This makes Xsat strongly head-final, and it also groups certain prefix types depending on where it expects the breaths to be (go see this https://conworkshop.com/view_article.php?ns=c55bc97e852be49a38a4f789e1023b2b article for info about the verb template). For instance, none of the adverbial prefixes, which go directly on the stem, end in a stop; prefixed onto that comes an optional incorporated noun root, which always ends in a stop, with a stop-less voice prefix in front of that. Before all of that, there's the pronominal prefixes, which usually end in a stop, but never have one before ending. Thus, the verb essentially has three "phrases" inside of it: the verb itself, the noun it affects, and the arguments of the verb, each one represented by its own breath.
Examples of how the phonotactics affect the structure also appear in other parts of speech, like external nouns - which take only a prefix denoting the person of the possessor, and possibly another incorporated noun - but it's by far the most apparent in the verbs.
So, Xsat's strangely restrictive yet extremely free phonotactics are heavily pervasive, impacting every aspect of the language, from the phonation, to the orthography, to the syntax structure. To be honest, it mostly just makes me want to see what can be done with other odd phonotactic structures. You know what? If you ever decide to play around with strange morphophonology, send me a message! I'd love to see what you can do with it. ✎ Edit Article ✖ Delete Article
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