Phaleran
| Phaleran | |
| Spoken in: | Phalera |
| Conworld: | Tom Wier's future history |
| Total speakers: | 18 million |
| Genealogical classification: | Tlaspian
|
| Basic word order: | SOV |
| Morphological type: | fusional |
| Morphosyntactic alignment: | split |
| Created by: | |
| Thomas R. Wier | 19??-2004 |
Phaleran is a fictional language by Thomas R. Wier, an American academic linguist specializing in Caucasian languages. The language is spoken on the fictional planet Phalera (though not on the entire planet) in the Upsilon Andromedae system in the far future. Related languages are spoken elsewhere on the planet and on the other two inhabited worlds of the Upsilon Andromedae system.
Phaleran is a member of the Tlaspian language family which descends from Tlaspi, a trade language of an interstellar human empire which by the time Phaleran as described here is spoken, has long since fallen apart. Wier once hinted at Tlaspi possibly being a descendant of English (is Tlaspi perhaps derived from trade speech?), which would make Tlaspian technically a branch of Germanic and thus of Indo-European, but if that is the case, the language has changed utterly beyond recognition (we don't even know how far in the future Phaleran is spoken). At any rate, Phaleran is typologically very far from Standard Average European.
Phonology
Consonants
The following chart follows the transcription system used by Wier, rather than IPA.
| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Postalveolar | Palatal | Velar | Uvular | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasals | Voiced | hm(*) | hn | ||||||
| Voiceless | m | n | ŋ(*) | ||||||
| Stops | Aspirated | ph | th | kh | |||||
| Plain | p | t | k | ||||||
| Glottalized | t' | k' | |||||||
| "Aspirated Glottalized" |
th'(*) | kh'(*) | |||||||
| "Voiced" | b(*) | d(*) | g(*) | ||||||
| Affricates | Aspirated | ch | čh | ||||||
| Plain | pf (*) | tþ | c | č | |||||
| Glottalized | c' | č' | |||||||
| "Voiced" | ĝ (*) | dž (*) | |||||||
| Fricatives | Voicless | f | þ | s | š | x | h | ||
| "Voiced" | ð (*) | z (*) | ž (*) | ||||||
| Laterals | Voiced | l | |||||||
| Voiceless | hl | ||||||||
| Trills | Voiced | r | ř | ||||||
| Voiceless | hr | ||||||||
| Glides | Voiced | w | y | ||||||
| Voiceless | hw | hy | |||||||
Consonants marked with (*) are not true phonemes of the language but artifacts of the writing system and are only encountered in hyperliterate speech.
Vowels
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| High | i ī | u ū | |
| Mid | e | o | |
| Low | a ā |
The vowels with macron are long vowels.
Diphthongs: ai au āi āu ei eu eo oi ou
