Muse

Muse is a language I made based on ⁵ui²y, my submission to the third annual Scratch Conlanging Contest. It uses a limited vowel-only phonology, musical registers to create a modality system, with a lexicon built around the concept of semantic primitives.

In essence, Toki Pona, but musical and complicated!

Vowels
Most of the prime vowels have reduced and rounded forms. The reduced forms of high vowels bring them 1 closer to the center on both axes, near-low vowels move to high-mid, and the central vowel becomes low. All fully front and back vowels have rounded forms, though none of the others do. This leads to 16 total vowels, depicted on this chart. All vowels also have nasal and voiceless/breathy forms.

Tone
Muse has a true-tone system, in which speakers must reach the exact pitch of the note for it to be a valid phoneme. These tones sit along various modifications of the pentatonic scale, depending on the register the speaker is using. Further detail on registers will be described in the grammar section.

Tones are listed as 1-5, from lowest to highest, regardless of the register.

Musescript
(TODO: Transfer from notebook.)

Romanization
Muse has three different romanizations: ASCII, Unicode, and IPA transcription.

ASCII Romanization Scheme
The prime vowels are represented as follows: Modifications are added to the prime vowels as follows: Length and tone is handled fully with numbers coming after the vowel, ideally written in superscript. Numbers 1-5 represent each tone on the register by height. Periods indicate short tones, repetitions of the tone indicate long tones, lists of multiple tones indicate movement at normal pace, lists of multiple tones separated by | indicate quick shifts between tones, and lists of multiple tones separated by / indicate quick but fluid changes between them. One can also use \ to indicate /, but falling.

Registers are written simply as the abbreviation of the english word representing the register (DEC, EMP, CUR, REM, REP, and VEN)

Example: DEC i,h51/2/44u5o*hn4.

Unicode Romanization Scheme
Prime vowels have the same representation as in ASCII. The markings, however, are different for the diacritics. Tones are also marked with unicode tone symbols, ˩ ˨ ˧ ˦ ˥. The same example from above would be written: DEC i̬̽˥˩˨˦˦|˥ u˥ o̥̽᷈˦|˨˩.

The IPA romanization scheme differs only in that it does not specifically mark reduction or rounding, but rather uses the IPA symbol for each vowel, as well as the proper IPA markings for voiceless and nasal vowels.

Registers
The registers of Muse are Declaration, Emphasis, Curiosity, Reminescence, Reprimand, and Veneration.