Walaan

General information
Walaan is a language using syllabary. With 86 syllabograms and 2 dialects the system covers all possible syllables in Walaan.

Writting System
The writting system of Walaan is syllabary. There is also some romanizated systems. The most common and accepted one is Barleimann. But another romanization system, Darlis-Perol, is also well known.

Here's all possible syllables in Walaan. Inside a cell, the upper one is Barleimann while the lower one is Darlis-Perol. The argument of these romanizations continues nowadays, but Barleimann is common in European and USA, while Darlis-Parol is well known and most used in Asia.

Since voiced consonants are not distinguished from voiceless ones, Barleimann tends not to use any voiced letter (such as d, g, v) to represent those unaspirated consonants. It used a letter "x" instead. Whereas unaspirated consonants are referred to by voiced letter in Darlis-Parol. For new learns, the term "txa" would be hard to read and "da" is more easy to pronounce, but he would never know that "da" isn't actually voiced in Walaan. "da" is unaspirated and sounds like the actually "d" in English, but not voiced.

The three syllabic consonants in Walaan are represented as "ng, nn, and ll" in Barleimann but "ng, n, and l" in Darlis-Parol. Though the former clearly indicates that these are syllabic (thus doubled), but the latter is more famaliar to new learners.

All the romanized Walaan below are Barleimann.

Consonants
The syllabic nasal nn becomes /ɱ/ before f, and /m/ before p. Syllabic alveolar nasal can't be followed by k and h. No nasals are allowed to be in front of any approximants and flaps.

Am I pronouncing it right?
New learners always have difficult time pronouncing "real" voiceless unaspirated consonants, and often replace them with voiced but also unaspirated consonants.

One traditional local method to examine one's pronounciation contains two parts:
 * 1) "Adadadada": say the term without any stop of the vibrating of your voice folds, then you'll have the right /d˭/. You can touch your throat to feel the vibrating of your voice folds. For some people (including me in the past) they might get /t˭/ and while saying the letter "d", their voice folds stop vibrating. During saying the whole term, one should feel his voice cords keep vibrating.
 * 2) "Ts-ts": to check whether its aspirated or not, you can put your fingers near your mouth and feel the air flow coming out. Do not try to vibrate your voice cords, just push the air out from your lung, and click your tongue like "ts-ts". Feel the strength of the air flow, distinguish the stronger one from the weaker one, then you'll have both /tʰ/ and /t˭/.

Diphthongs and Long Vowels
Two different vowels together become diphthong. When two same vowels meet, they can be regarded as one lengthene vowel. There can't be any syllabic consonants (mm, nn, and ll) after a lengthened syllable. All the four terms in the chart above are different in Walaan.

Gemination
Some consonants (all of them are plosive of affricative) in Walaan can be lengthened as well. These long consonants will never appear in the head of a word, and to most people is sounds like the vowel before the long consonant is shortened. This feature is represented by a little reverse "c".

The pitch of the vowel before the long consonants is always higher than usual. The length of both vowels and consonants is distinctive in Walaan.

Syllables
Most syllables in Walaan is open (CV). Some syllables don't exist in Walaan.
 * Y: yi, yeo
 * W: wu, weo
 * H: hi, hu, heo

Nouns
Nouns of Walaan are pretty easy. There is no declension at all.

Though there are still particles that can be attached to the nouns.

Verbs
There are currently 3 types of verbs: a-verbs ,and eya-verbs, and some irregular verbs.

Realis Form and Irrealis Form
Most of the time the realis form of a verb is followed by nouns, where as irrealis form can be combined with a lot of auxiliaries and other words in order to "complete its meaning".

Adjective
Adjectives of Valaan share the same conjugation. They can be regarded as a stem with a verb (or copula) to following. Adjectives are put in front of modified noun. The adjectives are glue together witht eh nouns. When there are plural adjectives modifying the same noun, the particle cha will be introduced to separate them.
 * Latemien. (red flower.)
 * Latechafasemien. (red and tiny flower.)

Syntax
(T)SVO

Vocabulary
Walaan/Lexicon

Example text
Leta manaa tumeta yayefi elisi mai?

''Perhaps she is my girl named Elise. 彼女こそ私のエリスなのだろうか？ 那位女孩就是我的愛麗絲嗎？''

Feta nachatemanafi fokxa txonone hewalapai.

''The story of the lovely girl will be told again and again. この可愛な少女の物語は何度も何度も話す. 這位可愛的女孩的故事將會被傳誦無數次. ''