Ashouctian/Orthography

The Ashouctian language uses the Latin alphabet. The 70 consonants and 4 vowels of the language are not represented in a 1:1 grapheme to phoneme ratio, but the language can be transcribed with little ambiguity.

Alphabet
Despite the large number of sounds in the language, it only uses 18 letters of the Latin alphabet, but also makes use of the accute accent.


 * a á b c d e é f g h i í l m n o ó p r s t u ú

The letters are named as follows:


 * a be ca de e fa ga fhas i al am an u-* pe rra si ta u

Letters with the acute accent are ignored when reciting the alphabet because the acute accent is used to mark ejective consonants. The language never makes use of j k q v w x y and z outside of foreign names. Loanwords are transcribed phonetically into the language.

Consonants
The 70 consonants of Ashouctian are transcribes using the following system.
 * The acute accent marking an ejective consonant is written on the following vowel, but never on ‹o›

Strong and weak consonants
The graphemes ‹t to d t ʼ s so sh sho s ʼ c co c ʼ  co ʼ › can all represent two distinct consonant sounds. In order to distinguish the two different sounds, the vowels following the grapheme are written differently.

Vowels
There are 4 vowels in Ashouctian as well as 4 diphthongs. Each vowel and diphthong has a weak and a strong variant, the strong variants of which are used after certain consonant graphemes in order to distinguish it from it's weak counterpart.

Weak vowels
These vowels are used after the so-called weak consonants, namely /t tʷ d tʼ s sʷ z zʷ sʼ k kʷ kʼ kʼʷ/

Strong vowels
There are two types of strong vowels: those that modify the consonant immediately before the vowel grapheme (as in seas - /ʃas/),  deemed adjacent vowels, and those that modify the consonant following the vowel grapheme (as in cueoc - /kuq/), deemed closed vowels. An adjacent vowel is used to represent /ʃpas/ (written speas) instead of using one of the modifying characters -adh or -dh because p only represents one sound in the language. However, /ʃkas/ cannot be written with an adjacent vowel because sceas is read as /sqas/ because c represents two distinct sounds. Therefore, /ʃkas/ must be written using -adh and is thus spelled sadhcas.

Usage of Ó and other modifying characters
In order to to fully phonetically transcribe the language, the language requires special modifying characters. They are listed in the table below along with their useage and an example.