Virž

General information
Virž encompasses a family of languages which are some of the most spoken on the planet Halonia. It has a unique background in comparison to natural human languages, in that it was developed initially by artificially intelligent robots to orally communicate digitized information to humans, and to an extent represents the continuing power struggle between the aureli (AI) and humans in Viržuran societies.

It boasts several features unfound or uncommon in human languages, such as a peculiar methods for forming adjective-like constructs

Consonants
Accute accents indicate syllabic phonemes. Note that above is the romanized orthography for Virž, and does not always match up to the IPA, but all symbols are placed correctly - e.g. "q" is the velar nasal, not a uvular stop.

Alphabet


Virž is written with a phonemic, semi-featural cursive alphabet that might be considered somewhat reminiscent of Arabic script. As most letterforms have distinct initial and medial versions, most Virž script is written without any need for spaces between words, although they are often added after letters with only one form, such as /f/.

The featural portion of the alphabet is in the use of dots to convey voicing (on obstruents) or syllabic variants (on liquids). On vowels it can be used to indicate nasality (in foreign language depictions, as Virž has no phonemic nasal vowels).

There are several letters in the Virž script that are generally only used in loanwords, as they are not natively phonemic sounds, including schwa and the diphthongs.

Phonotactics
While syllabic liquids are generally pronounced identically in all parts of a word, and can be combined with vowels or even diphthongs to make very long syllables, when they are ultimately word-final and follow a vowel they are pronounced as a short onset followed by a schwa:
 * bŕaz /bəɹaz/ 'awaken'
 * måuńdø /maʊəndœ/ 'herb'
 * kurŕ /kurəɹ/ 'bear'
 * hïmĺ /hɪməl/ 'bravery'
 * parfïń /parfɪnə/ 'target'