If you ever do end up making one I'd love to see it! I could list the consonants I have too if you wanted to see them. Love your idea for the voiceless n. I was wondering what you thought about a chiss space sprachbund? I was thinking about the other languages we know are spoken around or in chiss space like taarja, tybroic and minninsiat and thought it would be cool if they had areal features. Tybroic might be part of the same language family as Cheunh, would you prefer it in the same family or not? For taarja we know Thalias describes it as "angular" which my brain interpreted as "guttural" so maybe it has /x χ ʁ ɣ/ and Cheunh doesn't? Minninsiat from the name alone makes me think of an Algonquin language so I guess it's in a different family from Cheunh. 1 of 2 part
hi!! first off thanks for these asks hehe, it gives my brain something to chew on
i. phonemic inventory chart – i’ll absolutely post it when i make one!! i’d love to see yours too but i’m nervous about seeing other people’s before i post mine because i don’t want it to look like i’ve copied things lol
ii. sprachbund – yessss ok so taarja and minnisiat are trade languages and i’m sure they, like sy bisti, have also been influenced somewhat by cheunh so i wouldn’t be surprised if they share some features! as for tybroic, since all we know is that it’s “an ancient chiss language” i think you could go either way re: it being in the same family as cheunh and both options are really cool. i LOVE the idea of all the different families having historic languages which are distantly related to each other and i think it’s absolutely feasible that a blend of those might have given rise to cheunh itself! on the other hand it would be super interesting if cheunh WAS one of the families’ historic languages, probably the most societally powerful family, and just passed down more or less unchanged until it became the foremost chiss language. that said, i’m sure there are populations of chiss very far removed from csilla who don’t speak cheunh at all so that’s also cool to think about 👀
re: taarja being “angular”! i think that’s a fun descriptor even though – or maybe because – it seems arbitrary and subjective, for example you interpreted it as “guttural” while my first reaction was to think of voiceless stops – but voiceless stops occur ALL THE TIME in chiss names so i don’t think my idea is what thalias meant lol!! i like your idea of guttural phonemes in taarja!
iii. sy bisti parent languages – ok so it’s implied in the 2017-2019 thrawn books that sy bisti and basic are not mutually intelligible, so i don’t think basic really had a hand in its creation. my guess is that apart from cheunh, it has contributions from one of more languages that are specific to a smallish area in wild space (it’s commonly used on lysatra so maybe it originated on or around there)!
iv. areal features again – phonemic aspirated consonants were definitely a feature of cheunh in legends and i’d love to see that brought back into canon because it’s super cool!! and yes, wouldn’t it be neat if cheunh had three distinct vowel lengths, like coatlan mixe? as for clicks, clicks my BELOVED, i think it would be really interesting if there was one click phoneme that had different placement allophones/variation depending on either surrounding sounds or geographical region!! i had a vso order in mind for cheunh that i thought was fun but i gotta remember what it was LOL. it would be really neat if it was a comparatively unusual one that was then shared by trade languages in the region!
v. apostrophe in cheunh orthography my BELOVED – tz said in Alliances that it represents a glottal stop (even if he doesn’t pronounce it himself lmaooo) so that’s absolutely what i go with! my one variation on that is that i’m convinced there are dialects of cheunh where the glottal stop is replaced by a click just because i think that’s very very cool 😊
vi. vowel system – oh boy i don’t have them all figured out yet but in addition to the /aieou/, here is a list of some of the less standard vowels i’ve assigned to various chiss names: æ, œ, ɘ, ʊ, y!
vii. cheunh grammar – this is where i get tripped up a lot of the time, as soon as i try to go past phonology at all 😂 i agree with them having no grammatical gender but i don’t have any bright ideas otherwise yet!!
viii. orthography – ok first off. i will advertise this every chance i get: my friend made a really cool cheunh script for transliterating stuff 1:1 from latin script and i think it looks really cool!! now let me delve into my headcanons and stuff for that. i think there are at least 2 writing systems for cheunh
-in legends, cheunh has an ideographic script, so i’m guessing that that’s probably still the case in new canon
-i think that much like japanese orthography, cheunh orthography also has a separate script for loanwords, which is where i would propose a phonetic alphabet or syllabary for sure
-as for how it looks, i’ve pictured cheunh characters as looking something like the Georgian script! i really like your idea too, the tsalagi syllabary has many characters that definitely have features i imagine written cheunh to have (:
-i have a headcanon that the middle part of chiss names is always 1 ideograph for a word that plays into their “name meaning” (:
ix. csilla – csilla is actually an existing name of hungarian origin! it’s pronounced [ˈt͡ʃillɒ], so that’s how i go about it for the planet name too. i extrapolate from this that the cs digraph in ‘csap’, for example, is also pronounced as [t͡ʃ].
as for ipa transliterations: i’ll write out a few of my favorite sounding ones as i say them myself. for me, i keep the stress and pronunciation the same in core names as they’re said in the full, just like they were taken right out of the full name! (with the exception that the core names don’t have glottal stops) i’ll admit that right now i’m a bit wishy-washy on whether i attach the glottal stop to the end of the preceding syllable or the beginning of the following one. i think both are cool options!
evroes’ky’mormi (oeskym) – [ɛvrˈœsʔkyʔˌmormi], [ˈœskym]
ufsa’mak’ro (samakro) – [ˈʊfsəʔˌmækʔɹo], [səˈmækʔɹo] (or swap ɹ for r)
che’ri – perhaps [ʃeʔ’ri] or [ʃeʔˈʀi], i have so many conflicting ideas for this girl’s name lol
mitth’ali’astov (thalias) – [mɪtθʔˈaliʔˌastov], [t͡θˈaliˌas] (when pronouncing mitth core names i’m guilty of starting them with more of an interdental affricate rather than a pure fricative, even though there’s only one T at the beginning of their core names 😅)
x. parting addition just for fun – i also think it would be super cool to have triplicate consonants as well as geminate. i know neither of these ideas is supported by the cheunh names and words we’ve seen so far, but a guy can dream, right?
thanks so much for letting me ramble about technical stuff!! it got me in the mood to really start gathering my ideas together and actually tightening it all up. it’s really a delight to hear when someone enjoys reading what i put out into the world!
