User:Robbiemuffin/Folly/Proper English

Proper English is a constructed language using English as a base and the federal government's Plain English guidelines as a muse.

The Alphabet
The uppercase letter is an IPA symbol for the phoneme, with some distinctions. The degree of allophone specificity is up to the writer (the default IPA is the first pronunciation listed). There are no descenders except for diacritics, thus:  β  for b as in vamos in spanish. Single-width characters are used wherever possible, such as ʤ.

In the table, the top row is the graph for the letter, in lowercase, the middle shows pronunciation of the name for the letter, and the botom row shows the main and sometimes secondary sound of the letter.

Digraphs
The letters y and h are a special class of letters; when combined with another letter, they may form digraphs and dipthongs. Each digraph with an alternate representation is accepted as having a minor form (rather like the ß ligature of German). The capitals are still the IPA graphemes.


 * The digraphs ("h", and "y") function in their special way by adding to the end of another letter.
 * The dipthongs ("y" only) instead come first, with the other letter modifying it (this functions much like the english Y, becoming a vowel in dipthongs).

All the dipthongs are rising sounds (like luego (es) or yesterday (en) ). The stress comes at the initiation of the sound, thus the speaker's voice rises into the dipthong. Contrast with acorn (ai-dipthong) (en) or restaurante (es).

Transliteration
A target of this language is to simplify and sonorate english. There is little better aesthetic resources for that than in other languages, and so particular care is taken to construct the alphabet accordingly.

In broad terms, there are three collective groups of consonant (or semivowel) articulations into which western languages crowd many distinct sounds: that is to say, the features of these sounds are broadly the similar but the speakers distinguish.

In this analogy, in the various forms of spanish there is variety in the third group across the different dialects. In slavic languages there is a variety of intersections of the first with the second and third groups (particularly in polish. It might be difficult to determine which phoneme belongs to which letters between those intersections and within the third group, especially where this is not made deliberate in the digraphs section. Japanese blurs "l" and "r", and as well vocalizes the "w" sound, and germinates some consonants. Accounting for these differences require expanding Japanese to the phonetic diversity of the other languages, and equalizing the consonants. It is otherwise remarkably similar to any other language in this way.

Spanish Transliteration
'v' is transliterated exactly like from english to spanish (b with /β/).

To english ears, different spanish accents tend to have different sounds.

Covering the spanish phonemes as well as the english approximates, we get:

Slavic Transliteration
West slavic and east slavic sounds are accounted for, but the (especially highly gluttive) balkan sounds are excluded from coverage. Further, the hard/soft distinction is not maintained unless already present in the germanic (in other words, as you would expect, coming from english).

The spanish table does a good job of covering a lot of the non-obvious transliterations in the slavics. All z-s and c-s fricatives are /z/ sounds of (casual, unspecified) s digraphs.

Covering the spanish phonemes as well as the english approximates, we get:

Vowels
English has 14 monotic vowels: simplicity itself. Whereas spanish has only 5. Nonetheless, outside of what feels like a complete lack of capital sounds and alternate "u" sounds, spanish will seem completely normal in a very short time. Despite "ɑ" being far more apt of a filler to the spanish vowel system in terms of how one positions the tongue, It is well replaced by a vowel already in spanish, /ä/. So I use the next most obvious filler, the /ə/, which ties down /ɜ ə/ and does a pretty good job with /o/ too.

Phrasing, Stress
Proper english is between mora-timed and stress-timed. It is technically mora-timed, but all stress that does not change the timing by more than the rate of speaking is normal: about like a first year japanese student coming from english. Like japanese, sequences of the form  are counted as two morae anywhere except at the end of the word, where it is a single morae. Unlike japanese, sequences like  at the start of the word are there own mora, not two. This creates a very pleasant sing-song quality to those words, but it also serves to fluidify japanese stress across the germanic words. This avoids the romanji-like intonation of many words, like:  * note that these examples represent how the person of the exotic language immitates the english word.

While the above avoids the ugly over-syllabication of Romanji, missing vowel sounds and semivowels may be added or migrate where appropriate between fully stopped consonants:
 * Migration 'actualmente' (es) → ak.t̠͡ʃwe.la ̯.men.te
 * Addition 'strengths' (en) → st̠ɾeŋktʰ.ɪ ̯s

Vocabulary
This is an object-quality language. In a strict sense every word is just an object — even verbs. All objects act as classes for other objects: the association of their nearness relations is rather like a thesaurus would detail the bulk of english. Verb objects denote events (in much the same way that "kill" denotes the event-death in some readings, more than it does a directed action). So, Event objects are used as verbs in the regular sense: But it allows for adjectival nouns and verbs: When you get into these grey areas, you notice the language starts to break down to a general sense of object-and-type anyway. There are lots of words that can modify other words this way, but just won't: What comes naturally is natural.
 * Justin strives for greatness. (en)
 * Samantha owns a car. (en)
 * 'typing is getting tiresome' (verb-as-noun)
 * 'google' (noun-as-verb)
 * 'swimmingly' (verb-as-adverb: brit, "ok" as in "not drowning")
 * 'she's not just beautiful, she's smoking' (verb-as-adjective)
 * 'she's not just smart, she's bank' (noun-as-adjective)
 * 'in a fight you have to go monster' (noun-as-adverb)

NSM
The rule of thumb is to always prefer english words, but not if their syllables are too complex. If it is a syllable with 3 consecutive consonants, it's time to look to spanish. Likewise, if the english word is arhythmic, or the spanish replacement is (including ending in -r), it is time to look to japanese.

substantives
PERSONALS (I, YOU, SOMEONE, etc)
 * 2nd — tu /tu/
 * 1st — u /o/
 * 3rd — ı̊ɾa /e.ɾa/

BODY
 * corpus - budı̊ /βo.di/
 * collective - culı̊ctı̊ba /ku.lek.ti.βʰa/

mental predicates
ANEMOTIONAL (THINK, etc)
 * think — cagaı̊ru /ka.ɣai.ɾu/
 * know — shı̊ru /ʃi.ɾu/
 * understand – ɰakaru /ɰa.ka.ɾu/

EMOTIONAL (FEEL, etc) WANT, FEEL, ACCEPT EXPERIENTIAL (SENSORY, etc) SEE, HEAR, BE

speech
SAY, WORD, TRUE actions, events and movement DO, HAPPEN, MOVE, PUT, GO existence and possession THERE IS, HAVE life and death LIVE, DIE time WHEN/TIME, NOW, BEFORE, AFTER, A LONG TIME, A SHORT TIME, FOR SOME TIME, MOMENT space WHERE/PLACE, HERE, ABOVE, BELOW; FAR, NEAR; SIDE, INSIDE; TOUCHING "logical" concepts NOT, MAYBE, CAN, BECAUSE, IF intensifier VERY augmentor MORE quantifiers ONE, TWO, SOME, ALL, MANY/MUCH evaluators GOOD, BAD descriptors BIG, SMALL, (LONG) taxonomy, partonomy KIND OF, PART OF; similarity LIKE determiners THIS, THE SAME, OTHER

Structure
Sentences are SVO or optionally SOV (but never OSV nor OVS), rather like Spanish. You can tell whom does what to whom by the order, the subject is always first.

Grammatical Qualities
All inflections are additive.


 * part (Event objects default to verbs, Quality ojects default to adjectives/adverbs, others to nouns)
 * 1) verb — (prefix) ab- /əb/ (to make non-Event objects into verbs)
 * 2) noun  — a /ə/ (to make Event objects into nouns)
 * 3) adverb — (suffix) -ʤuı̊ /d͡ʒoɪ/ (inflection)
 * 4) adjective — (suffix) -muı̊ /moɪ/ (inflection)
 * person
 * 1) pronoun (word)
 * 2) * 2nd — tu /tu/
 * 3) * 1st — u /o/
 * 4) * 3rd — ı̊ɾa /eɾa/
 * 5) modifiers
 * 6) * genders are inspecific (there are no trully neuter forms)
 * 7) * male — (prefix) ı̊- /i/ (inflection on the pronoun)
 * 8) * female — (prefix) a- /ä/ (inflection on the pronoun)
 * 9) * their count are singular
 * 10) * plural — (suffix) -s /s/ (inflection on the pronoun)
 * tense (periphrastic) makes this like an isolating language!
 * 1) present - default immediate/imperative, approximate (spanish sense of 'at once')
 * 2) past — ɰun /ʍon/
 * 3) future — ɰı̊l /ʍɪl/
 * aspects (inflection)
 * perfect — (suffix) -ı̊stı̊ /istʰe/ (past-oriented relative demarkation, context point is centered at some point in time)
 * continuous — (suffix) -adu /ad̪o/ (through some moment, centered at some point in time)
 * momentane — (suffix) -undu /unðo/ (at that very moment, centered at some point in time)
 * moods (periphrastic)
 * imperfective — ı̊t /et/
 * cohortative — ɰı̊h /wiɣ/
 * counterfactual — ɰud /wʊd/
 * voice
 * 1) active & mediopassive - default
 * 2) passive —  upun /upon/  (periphrastic)
 * narratival (Conjunctions, anti-conjunctions, interjections)
 * honorifics
 * 1) regular speach is non-honorific
 * 2) to honorify, add "-sama" to the pronoun and to the verb append the periphrastic: gusaı̊ /gozaɪ/
 * 3) to humilify, add "-wa" (chosen for its similarity to the 2nd/3rd person) append to the verb: dufas /dufəs/
 * 4) the pronouns change with honorific
 * 5) * first, third person — no forms
 * 6) the pronouns also change with humilifics
 * 7) * second, third person — no forms
 * 8) * first person plural - this is effectively singular, despite itself. the person demotes his representation in the group, not the group itself; as it intrinsically accepts overall responsibility for that which is being discussed.

Notes:
 * Tense is always first in verb formation. Thus it is "ɰı̊l ɰı̊h abgoogle" for "Let us google (tomorrow)".
 * The counterfactual is used for both the precident and the antecedant. It is for hypotheticals, expectations, inverse probabilities, and eventualities.  Thus, even though we know, factually, that tomorrow 1+1 will still equal 2, we use the future counterfactual to express that.
 * The cohortative is such that in the present, it adds emphasis much like "pretty please", in the future it is the same ("may we? oh, would that we could"), and it the past it expresses wishes, desires of past events ("oh would that it were"). Its purpose is to generally to gloss honorific with someone without actually being formal. On a date, to impress and stress familiarity, you use cohortative.
 * momentane in its simple form is used to distinguish between immediacy and approximacy. Imagine the example of someone at the door. In english you say "I'll get the door.", and then you go to the door.  In spanish you say "I open it." instead. Proper English is more like the spanish, both the next event and the current one are 'now'. To distinguish between (5 minutes from now) and (immediately), use the momentane.  Likewise, in past or future tenses, the momentane ties the action very precisely to the time (when the emphasis is needed).
 * in-the tense formations (such as future in the past) are, like in english, formed by concatenation and informed by context.