Parukon

Parukon Pạ̄rukon/Tīrekūbin
Pronounced:	[pɑː.ru.kon] or [tiː.ɾe.kuː.βin]
Species:	Human
Spoken:	Parkia
Total speakers:	Around 20k
Writing system:	Latin/Arbūi
Genealogy:	??? Parukon
Typology
Morphological type:	Analytic with fusional particles
Morphosyntactic alignment:	Ergative
Basic word order:	VSO by default, but relatively free
Credits
Creator:	Koyeniru
Created:	June-July 2025

Parukon (autoglossonym: Pạ̄rukon [pɑː.ru.kon]) is a language isolate, spoken by the majority of habitants on the island of Parkia. In the Parkian religion, it is believed that language was originally a divine invention, brought by Tīredạ for the humans to use. They are the superior god believed to be the origin of humans themselves, which, like all of the other gods, is represented by a constellation in the nightsky. This belief is the origin of the second endonym of the language, which is Tīrekūbin (roughly translates to "the language of Tīredạ").

Grammatically speaking, Parukon is an analytic language, that makes use of a bunch of verb stacking and particles, which is the only part of speech which is not analytic, but rather fusional, as a lot of particle merging occurs. It might also be analyzed as an oligoanalytic language, because of the extremely small size of its dictionnary, which contains around 250-300 words, 1/5 of them being grammatical particles.

Phonology

Consonants

Table

Consonants
	Bilabial		Alveolar		"Palatal"		Velar
Nasal		m		n
Plosive	p	b	t	d			k	g
Fricative		β	s	z	ʂ~ç		x
Other				ɾ		j

Notes:

• /β/ can be pronounced [β], [w], [v], or [ʋ], depending on the speaker.
• /x/ has a tendency to be dropped in some words, creating either a long vowel or a hiatus, fixed by an epenthetic glottal stop. (ex. kahạ̄ [ka.ʔɑː])
• /ʂ/ is not a "true" retroflex fricative, but rather an advanced palatal fricative [ç̟]. It is also a quite rare phoneme, occuring in around 2% of words

Orthography

• /ʂ/ is either written ⟨ƶ⟩ or ⟨ꞩ⟩ (neither of them is preferred, but this article will use ⟨ƶ⟩), or sometimes even ⟨s⟩, making it indissociable from /s/
• /h/ is either written ⟨x⟩ and ⟨h⟩, though the latter is much preferred
• /ɾ/ is written ⟨r⟩
• /j/ is either written ⟨j⟩ or ⟨y⟩, though the latter is much preferred

Vowels

Vowels
	Front		Central		Back
High	/i/			[ʉ]		/u/
Near-high	[ɪ̟]					[ʊ̠]
High-mid	/e/					/o/
Mid			[ə][1]
Low-mid	[ɛ]					[ɔ]
Low	/a/				/ɑ~ɒ/

Orthography

• /ɑ/ is written ⟨ạ⟩
• Long vowels are written with a macron (⟨ā⟩, ⟨ē⟩ etc.)

Allophony

Short vowel allophony

In most dialects, short vowels have allophones, either in free variation or depending on the environment:

• /i/ is pronounced:
  • [ɪ̟] in unstressed syllables.
  • [i] everywhere else.
• /u/ is pronounced:
  • [u] in isolation.
  • [ʊ̠] in unstressed syllables.
  • [ʉ] everywhere else.
• /e/ is pronounced:
  • [ɛ] before velars.
  • [ə] in unstressed syllables.
  • [e] everywhere else.
• /o/ is pronounced:
  • [ɔ] before velars.
  • [ə] in unstressed syllables.
  • [o] everywhere else.
• /a/ is either pronounced [a] or somewhere in the vicinity of [æ], both allophones being in free variation.
• /ɑ/ is either pronounced [ɑ] or [ɒ], both allophones being in free variation.
  

However, in the classical dialect, which roughly corresponds to the dialect spoken by people in the north-west of the island, vowel reduction does not happen, leaving only 9 vowels, being [a~æ], [ɑ~ɒ], [e], [ɛ], [i], [o], [ɔ], [u] and [ʉ].

Long vowel allophony

Except for /a/ and /ɑ/, all long vowels are realized normally, even though they have a tendency to slightly shorten when unstressed, especially in the eastern dialects.