Syllabic denial

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Creation-Date: 2015-01-20T23:27:34+00:00

====== Syllabic denial ======
Created Tuesday 20 January 2015

Egonyota Pasaru – //Untšyerf.//
Rattssaw – //Pwielskk Tayklaymayffcé// (literally, severance with the syllables), sometimes jokingly referred to as  //ppfssrkśfwá,// joining //ppfssr// (foreign) and //srkśfwá// (knot), noting how these tend to trip foreigners up.

Some langauges in Pseudo, like [[Languages:Egonyota Pasaru|Egonyota Pasaru]], simply have so many phonemes it's very hard for them to syllabify them, as the phonemes are used in all sorts of unusual manners. When this happens, the idea of syllables slowly fade away in the mind, and is replaced with the concept of //phonemic runs//, which abbreviates to //phonoruns//.

Since the most common case of syllabic denial is held to be langauges in the Rattssaw family, we shall use [[Rattssaw]] to demonstrate how it works.

===== The Phonorun =====
The simplest grouping of phonemes or segments is called a **phonorun**, or a **run** if context allows. It groups a line of contiguous segments together. Phonoruns have no structure within (that's why they're considered "simpler" than syllables in a way) and therefore are simply just collections, nothing more.

However, all segments in a run must have some common property. Sometimes, it's as simple as voicing: the run is a continuous pile of phonemes that are all voiced or unvoiced. Other times, as in Rattssaw, they are horrible and difficult to nail down. We'll discuss below the rather poorly-defined concept of a restrictive and a nonrestrictive phoneme.

==== Restrictive and Nonrestrictive Phonemes ====
To understand the phonorun, one must understand the difference between **restrictive** and **nonrestrictive** phonemes. Restrictiveness is an attribute of the phoneme that, essentially, only exists within a given language. Sometimes, restrictiveness is **inherited** from the letter previously used.

As noted before, each language has its idea of what each phoneme is. Rattssaw has three main categories in theory, and two in practice:

1. **Open** phonemes are all vowels plus «h».
2. **Closed** phonemes are «p b t d pp bb tt dd þ f ff k g kk j ss #»
3. **Inheritable** phonemes are all remaining phonemes, that is «l r rr þþ z s f x ś m n ng».

Inheritable phonemes are phonemes that inherit their openness and closedness by the last non-inheritable phoneme. Some languages have them, others don't. Their existence generally stabilises phonemes' relative positions, because they make runs longer, and with denialist languages, runs have an optimal length greater than 1 that all runs try to go to. For instance, the name of the writing system of Rattssaw in Rattssaw, "#bezrattssá", would be syllabified as "#b-e-zr-a-ttss-á".

==== Alternative divisions ====
As noted before, arbitrarily dividing phonemes into "open" and "closed" is not the only way one can do the division. Here are some other ways that languages can divide it.

===== Phonoruns and Words =====
A word is made up of one or more runs. In denialist languages, where pronounciation is usually run-timed, the number of runs in each word is the equivalent of the

==== Notation and signatures ====
Our example word "#bezrattssá", as noted before, has the following runs in this sequence:

	2 Closed, 1 Open, 2 Closed, 1 Open, 2 Closed, 1 Open.

We can abbreviate this as:

	C2O1C2O1C2O1

But since closed and open runs must alternate in Rattssaw (and in most denialist languages as well, as the most common division of phonemes would split the phonemes in two plus a list of inheritable phonemes), all the Cs and Os save the first is unnecessary, and we then arrive at the canonical form of the word's **signature** (ajalin–#alin, or wálin in some places):

	__C2121__.

(Languages that have more than three categories don't usually have this helpful shortening, but in that case some other conventions can be made.)

In other cases, it might better to indicate exactly which run has which property. In that case we draw zigzags around the numbers like so:

	2̲/1̅\2̲/1̅ (or 2/1\2/1 if the underlines and the overlines break your font.)

In languages that have more than two levels, additional distinguishing marks might be necessary to show which type of run is the new one.

Writing out the boundaries directly crystallises some terms almost immediately:

1. Words can be classified as **closed-start** (gtt kksuər) or **open-start** (oiw kksuər) based on whether or not the first letter in the word's signature is C or O. Similarly, there are the terms **closed-end** (gtt élwóuppś) and **open-end** (oiw élwóuppś), which is easier to identify if we use slashes.
2. A / would be called a **rising edge** (ffrś lep), whereas a \ would be called a **falling edge** (áś lep). The two would collectively be called **edges** or **boundaries** (ayəron).