Večʼapruga
Posted: 18 Aug 2021 01:03
Večʼapruga
Večʼapruga, or otherwise known with its anglicised name Vechaprian, is a language spoken in the Caspian Sea on a fictional island which splits the lake into two major parts. Due to this favourable position, the island became comparatively wealth thanks to trade routes, but these routes also caused it to be a desirable place to conquer. It is spoken by about five million people, the exact number has not been decided yet.
When it comes to aesthetics, Armenian was a notable inspiration - and probably the only one. However, vocabulary and grammar is not influenced by Armenian and non-native vocabulary mostly comes from Persian, Greek, Arabic and Russian (though sound changes have made some earlier loans unrecognisable on first sight), so the similarities with Armenian already end after the romanisation.
1. Phonology
1.1 Consonants
/b p pʰ d t tʰ g k kʰ/ <b p pʼ d t tʼ g k kʼ>
/dz ts tsʰ dʒ tʃ tʃʰ/ <j c cʼ ǰ č čʼ>
/(f) v s z ʃ ʒ x/ <(f) v s z š ž x>
/m n l r j/ <m n l r y>
just seeing the messed up ǰ makes me want to throw everything overboard AAAARGH
Vechaprian's consonant inventory is fairly average and doesn't contain any unusual gaps. The most defining aspect of its inventory is the consistent distinction between voiced, voiceless and voiceless aspirated stops similar to Ancient Greek, but Vechaprian also features this distinction in its affricates.
Notes:
- I normally use a normal apostrophe to romanise the aspirated consonants, but on this website the ejective apostrophe looks better to me.
- The voiced stops can be [β ð ɣ] intervocally for some speakers.
- To the east, /s z/ are realised as [θ ð], a feature shared with the Turkmen language. Thus, /d/ and /z/ partially merge for these speakers.
- /x/ is pronounced as [h] intervocally, and for some speakers also at the beginning of an utterance. In other instances, the pronunciation varies between [x] or [χ] (voiceless uvular fricative for those who get shown the same letter twice) and [ɣ] or [ʁ] in voiced clusters respectively.
- /v/'s realisation in coda position is always [w]. Some dialects' pronunciation of /v/ is [w] everywhere.
1.2. Vowels
/i ɨ u/ <i u o>
/e ə o/ <ẹ e ọ>
/ɑ/ <a>
The vowel inventory of Vechaprian is a standard five vowel system with two additional central vowels. The romanisation might raise questions, but when looking at the earlier qualities, they are pretty clear. In a condensed version, /aw > o > u > ɨ/ and /aj > e > ə/ is all that happened.
Notes:
- Most speakers pronounce /e o/ as [e̞ o̞] or even as [ɛ ɔ]. The pronunciation depends solely on the speaker similar to Italian.
- The eastern regions closer to Turkmenistan tend to pronounce /ɨ ə/ as [y ø]. The latter of course can lower to [ø̞] or [œ] depending on the speaker.
- When a word starts with two consonants, the cluster gets broken up with a schwa in fast speech if the preceding word ended in a consonant.
1.3. Stress
Stress in Vechaprian is consistently placed on the last syllable of a lemma's stem. As most suffixes are just one syllable, most Vechaprian words are thus pronounced on the penultimate, while there are some pronounced on the last syllable or the antepenultimate. Recent loanwords can deviate from this rule and have their stress placed on a syllable that is not the stem's last syllable.
meskutʼ /məsˈkɨtʰ/ 'mosque'
meskutʼe /məsˈkɨ.tʰə/ 'mosques'
Sajora /sɑˈdzu.rɑ/ 'Greece'
Sajoracan /sɑˈdzu.rɑ.tsɑn/ 'from Greece'
Derivational suffixes - of course - count as the word stem, so they can be stressed compared to inflectional suffixes which never receive stress.
2. Alphabet
Vechaprian has its own alphabet which was created during the 4th century just as the Armenian and Georgian alphabets with the introduction of Christianity. Most letters derive from the Greek alphabet, but some were taken from surrounding alphabets for sounds that the Greek alphabet did not have any letters for. I do not have the alphabet ready yet, because when coming up with a natural development for each letter, a lot of them look too much to their Greek/Latin counterpart or they merge with too many other letters. So as a placeholder, I am using the Cyrillic alphabet.
а п к т ц х е в з ѕ д
a p k t c x e v z j d
и кı чı л џ м н ь с о пı
i kʼ čʼ l ǰ m n y s o pʼ
ж р ч ш тı цı у б г е̄ о̄
ž r č š tʼ cʼ u b g ẹ ọ
For the cyrillisation, I have chosen the palochka to mark the aspiration as it does in another language. In my dictionary's font, the palochka's miniscule looks like a dotless i, hence I am using the dotless i in here to reflect that.
The alphabetic order of the Vechaprian alphabet is/was based on the Greek ordering of letters, but the added letters and the sound changes have obscured it a bit. Some of the glyphs stem from older digraphs, those are <c> (ti), <čʼ> (kʼi), <ǰ> (li), <y> (ni), <cʼ> (tʼi), <ẹ> (ai) and <ọ> (av), which for the consonants may explain their position in the alphabet. There were more letters in the past, but some of them merged in pronunciation, therefore only one letter for each sound survived. Maybe I'll add them back in in the future, just to have some naturalistic spelling quirks? Who knows.
I would've liked to put a farewell in Vecheprian at the end, but I haven't found a construction I am happy with, so: Thanks for reading!
Večʼapruga, or otherwise known with its anglicised name Vechaprian, is a language spoken in the Caspian Sea on a fictional island which splits the lake into two major parts. Due to this favourable position, the island became comparatively wealth thanks to trade routes, but these routes also caused it to be a desirable place to conquer. It is spoken by about five million people, the exact number has not been decided yet.
When it comes to aesthetics, Armenian was a notable inspiration - and probably the only one. However, vocabulary and grammar is not influenced by Armenian and non-native vocabulary mostly comes from Persian, Greek, Arabic and Russian (though sound changes have made some earlier loans unrecognisable on first sight), so the similarities with Armenian already end after the romanisation.
1. Phonology
1.1 Consonants
/b p pʰ d t tʰ g k kʰ/ <b p pʼ d t tʼ g k kʼ>
/dz ts tsʰ dʒ tʃ tʃʰ/ <j c cʼ ǰ č čʼ>
/(f) v s z ʃ ʒ x/ <(f) v s z š ž x>
/m n l r j/ <m n l r y>
Vechaprian's consonant inventory is fairly average and doesn't contain any unusual gaps. The most defining aspect of its inventory is the consistent distinction between voiced, voiceless and voiceless aspirated stops similar to Ancient Greek, but Vechaprian also features this distinction in its affricates.
Notes:
- I normally use a normal apostrophe to romanise the aspirated consonants, but on this website the ejective apostrophe looks better to me.
- The voiced stops can be [β ð ɣ] intervocally for some speakers.
- To the east, /s z/ are realised as [θ ð], a feature shared with the Turkmen language. Thus, /d/ and /z/ partially merge for these speakers.
- /x/ is pronounced as [h] intervocally, and for some speakers also at the beginning of an utterance. In other instances, the pronunciation varies between [x] or [χ] (voiceless uvular fricative for those who get shown the same letter twice) and [ɣ] or [ʁ] in voiced clusters respectively.
- /v/'s realisation in coda position is always [w]. Some dialects' pronunciation of /v/ is [w] everywhere.
1.2. Vowels
/i ɨ u/ <i u o>
/e ə o/ <ẹ e ọ>
/ɑ/ <a>
The vowel inventory of Vechaprian is a standard five vowel system with two additional central vowels. The romanisation might raise questions, but when looking at the earlier qualities, they are pretty clear. In a condensed version, /aw > o > u > ɨ/ and /aj > e > ə/ is all that happened.
Notes:
- Most speakers pronounce /e o/ as [e̞ o̞] or even as [ɛ ɔ]. The pronunciation depends solely on the speaker similar to Italian.
- The eastern regions closer to Turkmenistan tend to pronounce /ɨ ə/ as [y ø]. The latter of course can lower to [ø̞] or [œ] depending on the speaker.
- When a word starts with two consonants, the cluster gets broken up with a schwa in fast speech if the preceding word ended in a consonant.
1.3. Stress
Stress in Vechaprian is consistently placed on the last syllable of a lemma's stem. As most suffixes are just one syllable, most Vechaprian words are thus pronounced on the penultimate, while there are some pronounced on the last syllable or the antepenultimate. Recent loanwords can deviate from this rule and have their stress placed on a syllable that is not the stem's last syllable.
meskutʼ /məsˈkɨtʰ/ 'mosque'
meskutʼe /məsˈkɨ.tʰə/ 'mosques'
Sajora /sɑˈdzu.rɑ/ 'Greece'
Sajoracan /sɑˈdzu.rɑ.tsɑn/ 'from Greece'
Derivational suffixes - of course - count as the word stem, so they can be stressed compared to inflectional suffixes which never receive stress.
2. Alphabet
Vechaprian has its own alphabet which was created during the 4th century just as the Armenian and Georgian alphabets with the introduction of Christianity. Most letters derive from the Greek alphabet, but some were taken from surrounding alphabets for sounds that the Greek alphabet did not have any letters for. I do not have the alphabet ready yet, because when coming up with a natural development for each letter, a lot of them look too much to their Greek/Latin counterpart or they merge with too many other letters. So as a placeholder, I am using the Cyrillic alphabet.
а п к т ц х е в з ѕ д
a p k t c x e v z j d
и кı чı л џ м н ь с о пı
i kʼ čʼ l ǰ m n y s o pʼ
ж р ч ш тı цı у б г е̄ о̄
ž r č š tʼ cʼ u b g ẹ ọ
For the cyrillisation, I have chosen the palochka to mark the aspiration as it does in another language. In my dictionary's font, the palochka's miniscule looks like a dotless i, hence I am using the dotless i in here to reflect that.
The alphabetic order of the Vechaprian alphabet is/was based on the Greek ordering of letters, but the added letters and the sound changes have obscured it a bit. Some of the glyphs stem from older digraphs, those are <c> (ti), <čʼ> (kʼi), <ǰ> (li), <y> (ni), <cʼ> (tʼi), <ẹ> (ai) and <ọ> (av), which for the consonants may explain their position in the alphabet. There were more letters in the past, but some of them merged in pronunciation, therefore only one letter for each sound survived. Maybe I'll add them back in in the future, just to have some naturalistic spelling quirks? Who knows.
I would've liked to put a farewell in Vecheprian at the end, but I haven't found a construction I am happy with, so: Thanks for reading!