Shidinn
| Shidinn (xdi8) | |
|---|---|
| Pronounced: | /sjiˈtjẽ/ |
| Writing system: | Shidinn alphabet |
| Credits | |
| Creator: | Huáng Quèfēi |
| Created: | ongoing since 1995 |
Shidinn is a constructed language invented by folk linguist Huáng Quèfēi. It is mainly based on a one-to-one correspondence of Chinese characters to Shidinn words. With 45 Shidinn letters of both phoneme and semantics, every single character is spelled using zero to multiple semantic letters (radicals) and a complete syllable (phonetic series) and read in an artificial phonology loosely based on southwestern Mandarin but not always comparable with Chinese as a sacrifice to more canonical phonotactics than Chinese. As a result, every character has a theoretical Shidinn pronunciation.
Shidinn itself is an incomplete language, because grammar is missing apart from phonology and vocabulary. Huáng devoted to developing a grammar but most of his manuscripts have been lost and his subsequent Shidinn texts are just transliterations of Chinese. There are some but not all Shidinidos adapting Huáng’s Shidinn phonology to new created grammar, including Common Shidinn, ‘Standard’ Shidinn, Shidio-Zhiyuanian. Therefore, the term ‘Shidinn’ commonly refers to its determined part, i.e., phonology and vocabulary, similar to the concept of absolute geometry.
