[Storm Knights] Any Linguists On the Board?

[Daddy Warpig]

I'm looking for a technical term. I can duplicate the sound physically, but don't know how to reflect it in explicit terminology.

If you say the English word "Hah", it produces a short outburst of air. A snort is the same sort of sound, only expelled through the nose: short, sharply expelled. A grunt is similar, as is barking ("ruff" used to imitate a dog.)

All these different sounds share similar characteristics. Is there a category for such sounds? If so, what is the term?

(Why? Each, or the majority, of Eidenal syllables are said with this same outburst of air.)

[Ram]

I'm looking for a technical term. I can duplicate the sound physically, but don't know how to reflect it in explicit terminology.

If you say the English word "Hah", it produces a short outburst of air. A snort is the same sort of sound, only expelled through the nose: short, sharply expelled. A grunt is similar, as is barking ("ruff" used to imitate a dog.)

All these different sounds share similar characteristics. Is there a category for such sounds? If so, what is the term?

(Why? Each, or the majority, of Eidenal syllables are said with this same outburst of air.)

To the extent you are referring to the breathiness of the sounds you describe, I believe you want to say they are aspirated.
Aspirated consonants from wikipedia.

[Daddy Warpig]

To the extent you are referring to the breathiness of the sounds you describe, I believe you want to say they are aspirated.

I believe you are correct, Ram. Thank you for that.

[Daddy Warpig]

(Some more linguistic description for critiquing.)

Phonology of Eidenal

Eidenal is an entirely spoken language. It depends on eidenos anatomy (snout, nasal chamber, throat, etc.), these determine what sounds ("phonemes") can be made. Even so, not all possible phonemes are meaningful in the language.

Different languages draw upon different subsets of the anatomically possible phonemes. Of such differences are accents made of.

(All eidenos speak the same language, though tribes from different continents have their own unique accents.)

Different languages have different "libraries" of phonemes, so speakers of different languages will "hear" the same foreign phoneme in different ways. The same Eidenal phoneme might sound like a "B" to an English speaker, a "D" to a German, and "T" to a Slav. In reality, none of these are exact representations, all merely approximate the Eidenal original.

Transcription is the process of representing phonemes with written symbols. As Eidenal lacks a written language, all transcriptions rely on using Core Earth languages to represent alien sounds. Transcriptions will vary greatly, depending on the language Eidenal is transcribed into.

There are many and varying ways of spelling Eidenal words. Especially during the first years of the Invasion, there will be no systematic study of Eidenal and no standard transcriptions. Spellings vary, and all are correct.

Even so, "Storm Knights" material will use an internally-consistent method, for the ease of the reader. This method assumes using English for the transcriptions.

Eidenal Morphemes

Eidenal is a gutteral tongue, favoring sharp, hard consonants and short, staccato syllables. Generally speaking, most morphemes follow a CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) pattern ("bor"), and a few rare ones are VCV ("eide", "ei" being a single vowel sound). When agglutinating syllables together, the last consonant of the leading syllable is usually elided. CVC+CVC becomes CV(C)CVC.

Aspiration is the sudden spurt of air that accompanies, for example, the "P" in the English word park. Nearly every syllable of Eidenal is aspirated, even consonants that are not usually aspirated in English.

Eidenos speak from the diaphragm, each syllable is a short, sharp outburst of air. This peculiar method of aspiration has no real equivalent in English.

Close analogues are the word "Hah!", a grunt of pain, or the word "ruff" (when used to mimic a barking dog). Eidenal is described as a language of grunts, contributing to the perception of the Eidenos as a race of primitives.