Introduction

This is a conlang project. My rough "goal" in creating this is to make a more phonologically and morphologically complex constructed language than I've done in the past, and translate some things into it. This is mainly so that I have an excuse to experiment with interesting (and maybe some unfamiliar) linguistic features.

The name "Unnamic" is derived from the word "unnamed"; modified with the "-ic" suffix and Proper-Noun'd with a capital "U". "Unnamic" is the English name for the language, i.e. an exonym, and not the native name for it.

This page will serve as the official documentation for my conlang.

Phonology

Phoneme inventory

The consonant inventory is as follows:

The vowel inventory is as follows:

Phonotactics

The legal structure for a syllable is C(C)V(C)(C)(C). In words with multiple syllables, the syllables that have coda consonants are separated by /ə/ sounds. Thus, in practice, the word will have more syllables than I'll analyze it as having. This is done in order to reduce the possibility of words containing illegal consonant clusters.

For example, take a word made of the syllables /min/ and /zde/. When combined, it would become /minəzde/, for which I will transcribe the syllable boundaries as /'minə.zde/, even though a syllable will traditionally never have a vowel after its coda consonants.

Legal consonant clusters

Legal consonant clusters are judged against all consonant pairs in a cluster. That is, a syllable with the structure CVCCC has a consonant triple at the end rather than a pair. This triple will be evaluated for its validity in pairs, i.e. CV[CC]C and CVC[CC] must both be valid.

The legality of a consonant cluster only matters in 0th transformation (read on to find out what that is). So, if a syllable consisting of legal consonant clusters begins containing illegal clusters in 1st, 2nd, etc. transformation, this is not a problem. But, if a syllable contains illegal consonant clusters in 0th transformation, this is not allowed, and the syllable is considered nonconforming to the rules of the language.

The following consonant pairs are valid within clusters:

Legal syllable-position consonants

The legality of 0th transformation consonants / consonant clusters is limited further, by the position of the cluster in the syllable. The initial consonant of a consonant cluster (including single-consonant "clusters") determines which positions the cluster may take within a syllable. I.e., some consonant clusters are legal in the coda but not the onset of a syllable, and vice versa - somewhat like how the consonant "-ng" in English cannot be used in the onset of a syllable.

See the table below:

This means that a word like /'kɾɛʐə.βne/ would be legal, but /'ʐɾɛkə.neβ/ would not.

Phonemic transformations

Phonemic transformations are sequences of changes applied to phonemes in order to indicate some sort of morphological difference. This is one of the things I wanted to try out with the conlang, so it is core to how it works. As such, it is necessary that I define a few termins to describe what kind of transformations the Unnamic language uses.

First, the simplest: "V-transformations". V-transformations apply to individual vowel phonemes, and there are only two possible transformations for a vowel. Those two transformations are V-0 and V-1. V-0 is the 0th transformation (i.e. the "basic", untransformed form of the vowel) and V-1 is the transformed form.

As always, a table is worth a hundred million or so words, so here is the relationship between vowels, their V-0 forms, and their V-1 forms.

As you can see, different vowels map to each other; being each others' V-1 forms. When a vowel has an alternate rounded/unrounded form, its V-1 is the that form. The only exception is the /ə/, as it has no morphological use and is only ever uttered as a syllable separator.

Second, "C-transformations". C-transformations apply to individual consonant phonemes. For any given consonant phoneme, there are four transformational forms: C-0 through C-3.

Here is the table for C-transformations:

The pattern is obvious. With few exceptions, going from C-0 to C-1 palatalizes the consonant; going from C-1 to C-2 depalatalizes it and changes the voicedness, and going from C-2 to C-3 repalatalizes it.

Third, we can put together V-transformations and C-transformations to get "S-transformations". As you can probably guess, S-transformations apply to entire syllables, and are actually just specific combinations of C-transformations and V-transformations. S-transformational forms range from S-0 to S-7.

Here is a table describing this idea:

To further elaborate: when transforming a syllable from S-0 to S-1, the vowel is transformed from V-0 to V-1. When transforming from S-1 to S-2, the consonants all change from C-0 to C-1 and the vowel changes back to V-0. When transforming from S-2 to S-3, the vowel changes from V-0 to V-1. And so on...

To fully illustrate what this actually means in practice, take the following example of all the S-transformational forms of the syllable /kɾɛβsʐ/:

This is important because this idea of transformation will be used extensively throughout the conlang. For shorthand, I will also say that "transforming" a vowel / consonant / syllable / word (see next section) refers to incrementing the degree of transformation (e.g. S-0 increments to S-1), and "detransforming" it refers to decrementing the degree of transformation (e.g. S-1 decrements to S-0).

As a special case, when an S-7 form is transformed, it wraps around to S-0. Same for C-3, V1, etc. And when an S-0, C-0, ..., form is detransformed, it becomes S-7, C-3, etc. Kind of like integer over/underflow behavior.

Stress

Phonemic stress is indicated by increased emphasis on a syllable, such as increased volume of speech, change in pitch, etc. Words each have a single stressed syllable; and it is worth noting that the stressed syllable includes the syllable separator in multi-syllable words. I.e., you'd also pronounce the /ə/ with increased pitch, volume, whatever.

As I briefly mentioned in the previous section, stress is relevant to phonemic transformations. Apart from V-, C-, and S-transformations, I define a "W-transformation", or "word transformation". W-transformations define which syllable the phonemic stress of a word falls on and are orthogonal to S/C/V-transformations.

By default, words are in W-0 form. In W-0 form, stress falls on the first syllable. In W-1 form, it falls on the second syllable. In W-2, on the third. Thus, this is the simplest possible phonemic transformation.

Romanization

In order to avoid having to write everything in IPA, it is necessary to define some sort of Romanization system. The Unnamic Romanization has the following three goals:

1. Map 1:1 to the IPA representation
2. Be ASCII-compatible
3. Not look too terrible

The easiest part is representing individual phonemes.

The consonants are represented as follows:

And vowels are as follows:

Words are written such that the first character of their first syllable is capitalized, and all the syllables are separated by spaces. If any of the syllables are in such an S-transformational form that contains palatalized phonemes, the vowel of the word is prefixed with a "y". If the first syllable of the word is stressed, then stress is not explicitly written; otherwise, the stressed syllable is prefixed with a single quote (').

For example, the word /kɾɛʐə'βne.ɡʲrʲʌɸʲzʲʂ/ would be written as "Kraezhe 'wnei grryafzsz". For a more comprehensive example of how stress and palatalization interacts with the Romanization, see the following table:

Word: Kraezhe wnei /kɾɛʐə.βne/

This system is certainly not perfect, but it's the best I've come up with, after a few tries, that balances my goals for the Romanization.

Grammar

stuff will be added here eventually...

Common expressions / idioms

stuff will be added here eventually...

Number system

stuff will be added here eventually...

Larger translation examples

stuff will be added here eventually...

Reference dictionary

stuff will be added here eventually...

Glossing abbreviations

stuff will be added here eventually...

Additional conlang tools

stuff will be added here eventually...