Phonology

Phonology of the Bauhinian language.

Categories: Language

Bauhinian features 6 vowels and 26 consonants. May God be kind to me.^[1]

Some readability rambling

Also I have successfully explained this language in a way that only Chinese and English bilinguals with a familiarity with the Arabic writing system (for example, me) would be able to get, so if anything's confusing worry not it's not your fault. Sorry I'm so bad at this 😭. I try not to assume anything though. No big promises. This is unfamiliar territory to me too.

What this file (and the others that I haven't made public but will eventually but you can go on my Github to check out) does assume is a familiarity with the Arabic writing system. I give you the complete pronunciation mapping here, and have written a blog post to teach you to read! (When I learned it, I used the Uyghurche textbook and it works wonders but it's in Chinese). I think that even if "learning Bauhinian" is a pointless waste of effort, being familiar with the Arabic script is totally worthwhile!

Vowels

Order	Latin	Sound-alike	سەث
1	a	maw / apple	ئا
2	e	set	ئە
3	ë	tea	ئې
4	i	tip	ئى
5	o	soap	ئو
6	u	loop	ئۇ

Compound vowels

Latin	Sound-alike	سەث
aw	bauhinian. Just this one place. I don't permit this to be used anywhere else.	ئاۋ
ai	type (note how the second letter is a "y" but is spelled "i" in Latin)	ئاي
ei	say	ئەي

Consonants

Order	Latin	Sound-alike	سەث
7	b		ب
8	p		پ
9	d		د
10	t		ت
11	k		ك
12	g		گ
13	f		ف
14	v		ڤ
15	h		ھ
16	m		م
17	n		ن
18	y		ي
19	w		ۋ
20	l		ل
21	z		ز
22	c	cats	څ
23	s		س
24	zh	juice and measure both work	ج
25	ch		چ
26	sh		ش
27	r	raw, tore	ر
28	j	机	ژ
29	q	期	ق
30	x	希	خ
31	th	thing	ث
32	dh	the	ذ

Note on the letter choices

The script is largely based on the Uyghurche alphabet. I mixed and matched some letters from different languages here. I'm not sure which ones are absent from Arabic since I only learned Uyghurche and not Arabic, but for the ones not present in Uyghurche, ث and ذ are from Arabic, څ is from Pashto, and ڤ is from Kurdish, Swahili, and a number of other languages.^[2]

The only letters for which I changed the pronunciation drastically were ق ,ژ, and خ, into Chinese j, q, and x, respectively. This is because I can't find any readily-available equivalent and don't want to add my own little dots while knowing shit.

Compound consonants

Latin	Sound-alike	سەث
dr	drive	جر
tr	tree	چر

Other consonant combos exist, but these are the only ones with different Latin spelling.

Writing rules

Bauhinian uses the Arabic script, which is written right-to-left, except for numbers which are left-to-right. I won't go into detail on writing in Arabic script here since there are plenty of other resources for it.

Just know that, like Uyghurche, the letter ئ is used as a vowel separator; and also if a word starts with a vowel, it must be preceded by this letter.

In addition, letters with two dots can be simplified in to a line in handwriting, and three dots can be simplified into a little arrow.

Pronunciation rules

For most words, try winging it how it might've sounded in English.
If an ى is at the end of a word, it gets prolonged into an ë.
The letters ق ,ژ, and خ are the most archaic letters, and there are explicit rules about their vowel combinations.
- When followed by ى or ې, nothing changes and everything is fine.
- When followed by ا or و, they get pronounced as if there's a ي in between. E.g. 架, 秋.
- When followed by ۇ, the 乌 turns into 淤. Same thing happens with ي for this point in particular.
- They cannot be followed by ai or ei.
- This is terrible because Chinese speakers don't need to be told this and non-speakers won't get it.
- Whatever (bashes head against computer screen). Anyway this reminded me of this joke. International student at TSA. "Do you have a laptop?" "No." TSA agent searches bag and pulls out a laptop. "What is this?" "This is computer."
The letter ۋ is not allowed to be after a vowel, except in the only exception, Bauhinia (bawhinya).
The letter ي is not allowed to be after a vowel that's not ئا or ئە. With those two, it acts as a single vowel and doesn't count as a consonant.
When the letter ل is after a vowel, it becomes… maybe not so much as a "dark L" but like, you immediately curl your tongue inwards as you pronounce the vowel. If you get it.
The letter ئا is standardly pronounced like "maw," or "copy," but can be shifted heavily into "apple" in words like "mama" or "papa." However, northerners like the Moose and the Sylvandians tend to pronounce it as apple in every word.
The letter ج can be pronounced as either a hard "juice" or a soft "measure," and is usually hard at the beginning of a word and soft in the middle.
Some voiced consonants turn unvoiced at the end of a word. Some unvoiced do the opposite. I don't know. I'll flesh this out later.
Most of these rules are in place because I found conjugations that made words awfully hard to pronounce for me at least and it should be illegal for ME to be unable to speak MY LANGUAGE fluently.

Syllable formation

One syllable can only have one vowel. It could have 0-2 consonants before and after, but doesn't usually get more than that. So (C)(C)V(C)(C).

Example

A good example for all the rules above is Nightsun يامىاكا (Yamiaka). It's typically pronounced "yamaka," dropping the i.

Now I put this here because it breaks the typical stress rules below. Yami'aka is stressed on the first syllable (so is "yami"). Sparky بەربەرلېن (Berberlën) is stressed on the last.

Stress

General rules; except when there are exceptions.

2-syllable words stress the second syllable.
3-syllable words stress either the second or the last, depending on the word.
- If a 2-syllable word got one suffix that made it 3-syllable, then: if the 2-syllable word was stressed on the first syllable then the 3-syllable one will also be stressed on the first.
Words with more syllables stress the second-to-last syllable.
For irregular stressing patterns, syllables whose vowel is i are prioritized last. Because it's a short vowel.

That's actually 32 in total, same as Uyghurche even. But Uyghurche has clear front / back vowel pairings and I don't! Help. So many consonants. Yet I love every one of them dearly and don't want to delete any of them. (It's mostly to flex how many consonants I can pronounce well though.)
The beauty of the Arabic script (aside from the fact that it's just really pretty) is how you can just make new letters by adding a shitton of dots to everything without them looking obviously extra. One dot, two dot, three dot; could've sworn I saw four-dot variants while digging through font files too. You can technically do the same in Latin with accents, but they just look so obviously added on.