Categories: Lore

Language

The language of the continent.

Due to literally being one Bauhinian Empire for thousands of years, everyone on the continent speaks one language. Though topolects and accents exist, the foundations of them are the same, and they always remain mutually intelligible. Here is all the info on the language! For a list of words in the language, refer to the lexicon!

Bauhinian features 8 vowels and 24 consonants.

Phonology

Vowels

Consonants

Letters with no sound-alikes sounds like how they would in English.

Rules

Syllables in Bauhinian are constructed with one of these patterns:

1. a single vowel (a, e)
2. consonant + vowel (pa, mo)
3. vowel + consonant (at, um)
4. consonant + vowel + consonant (nam, wās)

Compound vowels or consonants are not allowed, except for the exceptions explained below.

Restrictions

1. Y cannot appear at the end of a syllable.
2. NG cannot appear at the start of a syllable.
3. J, Q, and X cannot be followed by Ā, Ī, or U.

Merging

If two (or more) letters got together, they're pronounced as if there's only one of them there. For example, suppose a word somehow got to "to + o + ol." It would be written as "toool," but pronounced like "tol." Same goes for consonants but I guess that's more obvious: "tok + kuz" = "tokkuz" but is pronounced as "tokuz."

Pronunciation

1. When J, Q, and X are followed by A, E, or O, they are pronounced with a compound I + whatever followed them. To illustrate:

• j + a = jia (加)
• q + e = qie (切)
• x + o = xiu (修。或是跟你们喜欢管"脚脚"叫"jio jio"一样的)

This is reflected on the pronunciation alone. In written form, nothing has changed.

2. The vowel I is typically short in Bauhinian. However, if it's at the very end of a word, with no consonant behind it, it becomes a long I. For example, the Bauhinian word "sili" is pronounced the same as the English word "silly."

Writing system

Bauhinian uses a syllabary, meaning each syllable is written as a single character. Please consult this handy graph:

(graph not drawn yet)

According to my calculations, the total possible number of characters in Bauhinian is 4392, so no way I'm drawing all that.

Font styles

tba

Latin transcription

Well most of Bauhinian you're gonna see here are Latinizations because writing those characters, saving them as pictures, and putting them here is tedious. These transcriptions, though, may pose challenges as it may not be obvious where a syllable ends or where the next one starts. In contexts that require absolute differentiation, a dash between syllables would suffice. For example, "tetet" could be either "tet-et" or "te-tet."

Grammar

tba

QnA