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Common (na Xafen): Difference between revisions
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! style="" |Mid | ! style="" |Mid | ||
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The central vowel schwa, /ə/, is the least stable element of this system. It is prone to being reduced or deleted in casual speech in unstressed syllables. It can occur in stressed syllables, where in many dialects it has a tendency to pull front or back between [ø] or [ʌ] depending on the place of articulation of any preceding consonant, or to favor some kind of consistent shift. In High Common, /ə/ is pronounced carefully and consistently, especially in stressed syllables. | The central vowel schwa, /ə/, is the least stable element of this system. It is prone to being reduced or deleted in casual speech in unstressed syllables. It can occur in stressed syllables, where in many dialects it has a tendency to pull front or back between [ø] or [ʌ] depending on the place of articulation of any preceding consonant, or to favor some kind of consistent shift. In High Common, /ə/ is pronounced carefully and consistently, especially in stressed syllables. | ||
===Orthography | ===Phonotactics=== | ||
====Stress==== | |||
====Prosody and Intonation==== | |||
===Morphophonology=== | |||
==Orthography== | |||
Common is written in a variant of the Latin alphabet. It uses the following letters natively: | Common is written in a variant of the Latin alphabet. It uses the following letters natively: | ||
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! scope="col" | Name | ! scope="col" | Name | ||
! scope="col" | Phoneme | ! scope="col" | Phoneme | ||
! scope="col" | Allophones | ! scope="col" | Allophones | ||
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| A, a | | A, a | ||
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=== | Common uses both upper and lower case letters. As in English, case is used as part of the rules of style and does not have a phonetic implication. | ||
The diphthong /aj/ is spelled aj, and the diphthong /aw/ is spelled aw. | |||
The names of the 21 letters of the proper Common alphabet came from the names Davidson gave the glyphs they corresponded to in the writing system for the ''Hillbillies'' TV show. The other letters were given names by the fan community in the early days of the language, with the versions used today being the versions unofficially blessed by Davidson (officially, Old Common never used these letters). The letter names are pronounced as spelled, with any leading y unstressed. | |||
High Common follows absolutely predictable spelling rules as above for native or nativized words. For loanwords, especially names, nonstandard pronunciations may be used and just have to be learned. Common speakers who don't know a special pronunciation may attempt a spelling pronunciation, which can produce some strange results. | |||
A good example is the name of the current NWO Chancellor, Eve Tanaka, who is of Japanese-American heritage and uses the traditional spelling of her name. The most common way this name gets rendered by Common speakers is ['iv.ə 'ta.na.ga]. The surname follows the stress pattern of Common, and speakers tend not to be conscious of the fact the k is supposed to be unvoiced, because there are no nonstandard letters in the word. However, the presence of the 'v' in Eve signals to most speakers that this word is supposed to have a special pronunciation, so there is a tendency to add a schwa to the end of the word to make the 'v' voiced, and often to pronounce the vowel [i] instead of [e]. Where Tanaka is a very well-known public figure, many people know details about her, such as that her name is spelled the old English way and pronounced [iv], but in other cases, more of a spelling pronunciation might prevail. | |||
In general, the presence of a special letter can be a signal that a word may have a special pronunciation. | |||
===Punctuation=== | |||
Common was invented in North America, and punctuation of the language's romanization and eventual native orthography was not a matter that the language's creator considered important enough to consider or dictate. Therefore, the punctuation of North American English heavily informs the punctuation of Common. Capitalization is very similar to English, with proper nouns and modifiers considered to be part of the name of something capitalized, as well as the first letter of sentences. Quotations and other punctuation follow the old American English style for the most part. In numbers, periods are used for decimal points, and commas for number separators. | |||
The biggest, most noticeable difference between High Common punctuation and North American English is that High Common uses inverted question marks and exclamation marks to open questions and exclamations in a manner similar to Spanish. In much of the early period Common this was not the case, but by the middle period, some writers were borrowing the inverted marks from Spanish, especially for speeches. Common, like Spanish, relies heavily on intonation to signal questions, and speakers reading a speech found the additional marks convenient to help them control their intonation at the outset of a sentence for things like rhetorical questions. | |||
By the modern period, the inverted marks were seen as an option, but what helped drive their wider acceptance was the fact that the first head of the AXZ, David Chang, chose to use these marks and recommended them in his first codification on the modern language, because he felt they were helpful to learners, and went well with the structure of Common. The modern AXZ simply states they must be used. It is still very common to omit them in casual writing. | |||
===Writing and Keyboards=== | |||
Like British English, Common is primarily written using keyboards, either physical or touchscreen, and secondarily using pen and paper. Historically, during much of its development, Common was written almost exclusively on keyboards, heavily favoring touch devices. | |||
During much of its development, Common was written using the English QWERTY keyboard or in variants - people who used the Roman alphabet natively tended to use their native keyboard, because the Common alphabet is a subset of most language's alphabets. This situation had certain impacts on the development of Common - for example, the tendency of writers in Common to omit accents, despite the fact Common has a small amount of phonemic stress, arose partly through laziness, because it is more work to write accents than not on an English QWERTY keyboard, even a smart one. | |||
The modern Common keyboard is quite different than the old QWERTY keyboard, although plainly a descendant. The physical version still has the Ctrl, Shift and Alt keys, and works on the principle that capital letters and special characters are obtained by using a shift key or toggle, and it still has a limited amount of punctuation directly available with a single keypress, especially on physical keyboards. | |||
However, the letter layout is based on frequency of use and the maximize speed and comfort of typing for touch typers on physical keyboards. Only the 21 letters of the Common alphabet are available directly as a single keypress. The other five letters, b, d, g, q and v, are available as shift characters on a physical keyboard, alt-shift for capitals, and on toggle keyboards on touchscreens. | |||
The impact of this change over time is that early to early modern Common borrowed vocabulary contained the letters b, d, g, q and v quite often, because they were convenient to type, but in modern times, there is a much stronger tendency to 'Commonize' borrowed words, even people's names, not only because of official efforts to encourage this, but also because these letters are now inconvenient to type. | |||
==Morphology== | ==Morphology== | ||
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