A Syllabary | RPG Blog Carnival of Words Entry #01

There comes a time in a nerd's life when they have to take a good, long look at what they've done with their time on earth and think to themselves... FUCK! I HAVEN'T EVEN HAD A PROPER STAB AT A CONLANG! 

Here is my first contribution to July's RPG BLOG CARNIVAL, hosted by the inestimable Rook. For this post I'm going to draft a syllabary and in doing so lay the foundations for a constructed language (conlang).

Cuneiform tablet

Syllabary

A syllabary is a set of written symbols ("syllabograms") representing the syllables of which a language's words are comprised. 

The Conlang

My understanding of linguistics is patchy. My entire knowledge of the subject arises from these 3 facts:

• My first major (incomplete, as I may have mentioned before) in Anthropology
• Teaching English as a foreign language in Vietnam, 2014-16 and 2018-19 
• Studying bilingual language acquisition to understand how my children develop linguistically

Given these three facts, my understanding of how to put a conlang is further  hampered. But I'm going to give it the good old fashioned college try! Apologies for any areas where technical terminology is misapplied, misunderstood or any other inappropriacy. 

Because it's the only non-Indo-European language with which I'm familiar, I'm going to use modern Vietnamese as a base (substrate?), and build a syllabary from there.

This conlang is intended as the lingua franca for the space opera/science fantasy setting I've been building as part of Chris McDowell's Galaxy 24 (meaning I will probably have to change all the spelling retroactively) 

Caveats:

• This conlang is not going to use tones (to reduce the number of possible syllables ) but also...
• ...this conlang will avoid (or attempt to avoid) the inclusion of Sino-Vietnamese vocabulary 
• I omitted the vowels "ă", "ê" ad some of the tripthongs, though I did add the dipthong /ei/ as a substitute for the vietnamese "ây" ("ei" does occur in some place names, most notably Pleiku, but is non-standard and derived from the local indigenous language)
• I simplified the consonants: 
• combing "k", "c" and "kh" as IPA /k/
• amalgamated "ch" and "tr" as /tr/ (which some local dialects do already) 
• changed "th" into /θ/ (as opposed to /tʰ/)
• "d" and "gi-" combined into /z/

But the most important caveat: this is not Vietnamese! This is a fantasy language and no doubt will deviate substantially as it develops. I'm essentially borrowing the phonology and remixing it.

Base Grid

To provide an impression of the project's size, I decided to start with a table, based on the following:

	ao	âu	ac
-	ao	âu	ac
/k/ (c,kh)	cao	câu	cac
/f/ (ph)	phao	phâu	phac

Syllables are thus comprised of a consonant from the first column and a vowel or vowel + consonant from the first row.

My stripped down, quasi-viet phonology consists of 20 initial consonants and 36 vowel/vowel+consonant "stems". 

At first blush that looks like 20 x 36 = 720 syllables, factor in the further 36 syllables without an intial consonant and that makes for 756 syllabograms.

Which is a lot, and sort of makes me wish I'd gone for an alphabet...

But I made my bed, please allow me to shit and piss all over it.

Othography

The challenge of the syllabary is that one first has to deal with phonology, the organisation of sounds/phones in the language. After ham-fisting that, one then progresses straight into orthography:

An orthography is a set of conventions for writing a language (wikipedia)

Rather than produce a selection of the 756 syllabograms, the logical route (to me, at least) seems to be making a sort of halfway alphabet/syllabary (apologies in advance to linguists who are probably tearing their hair out at me reinventing the wheel or whatever).

This method entails coming up with two sets of symbols: one for the 20 initial consonants, and one for the 36 vowel/vowel consonant sets. 

These symbols can then be connected to make a unique syllabogram, like so:

  

This was a first pass: the logical method would be to make the initial consonant less dominant but still distinct, sort of 2/3 size. THe other aspect not yet considered is how the orthography is informed by writing method, so I think this is going to require a little more thought! I'll return to this presently, but prior to that I hope to publish another rpg-blog-carnival-of-words post related to the linguistics rpg (but  is it really an RPG?) DIALECT. 

Links

There's this thing called Wikipedia you can use to look up things online, I've found it a vast improvement over my 1997 Encarta CD Rom. 

RPG BLOG CARNIVAL: WORDS
https://foreignplanets.blogspot.com/2024/06/words-etymology-onomatology-and.html

Galaxy 24|
https://bastionland.substack.com/p/a-galaxy-in-a-year