Salura

General information
Salura is a conlang spoken by alien crustacean-taurs on the planet Ysla. It is unique in that, like its speakers, it 'amphibious' ; it appears both on land and in the water, and differently in each. On land, it is called tapa'a, or "rhythm-talk," and it is fairly similar in many aspects to human languages. In the water, however, where it is called Soila'a, the same words and sentence structure are mapped to corresponding phonemes based around an absolute pitch system; in other words, it is a sung language.

Since the pitch is absolute, members of the species without perfect musical pitch are unable to communicate effectively in Soila'a, and it would be unconvenable to learning for most humans.

Phonology
The main differences between Tapa'a and Soila'a is in the phonology.

The Saru do not have a nasal cavity, but they do have a secondary resonating chamber behind the gills ('vents', hence 'ventral') that is used in some sounds, which are written with nasal and glide symbols for convenience.

The topmost row below indicates the phonemic pitch in note (and the solfège names for each) for Soila'a consonants that correspond to the Tapa'a place of articulation. On top of this pitch there are also microtonal variations at the offset of the consonant which indicate the vowel.

Consonants
There are also two Tapa'a approximants, [w] and [j], written "o" and "e" respectively. In Soila'a, these do not correspond to an absolute pitch, but instead to a modification of the onset with a short trill; a sharp trill indicates [j] and a flat trill [w].

'Crackling' is a sound that is produced by forcing water through the vocal tract

Vowels
Vowels are expressed in Soila'a as a microtonal rise or dip at the end of the consonant segment. If it is a sharp offest (rise), it indicates /i/ ; flat offsets are /u/; and no tone change at offset indicates /a/.

Examples
The IPA rising/falling tonal symbols will be used below; if they are written before their note, it indicates an initial trill on the note. Colons indicate long sounds, dots underneath crackled ones, and umlauts ventrals. As can be seen, it is much more economical to write Salura in Tapa'a, or perhaps with proper musical notation. Similarly, Tapa'a is also much more economical to speak, as words can be produced much more quickly with much less weight on duration and repetition.