Henton Saxon

General Info
Though the language itself is in general referred to plainly as Sächsisch — natively rendered as Saxisch — the term Henton Saxon refers specifically to the language codified by the Henton & Ȝearliȝe Wordbook (henceforth abbreviated as H&Ȝ), pressed by the Wessiȝ Prefecture and the Burgraveship of Fromenmoot. The grammatical norms and words defined in the H&Ȝ somewhat accurately reflect the semi-standardised variety of a Saxon language spoken in eastern Cornwall, in Wessiȝ, Suthiȝ and Kent, though much dialectical standardisation and levelling is shown in the H&Ȝ forms.

The proscribed name for this form of the language is formally Henton-and-Ȝearliȝe Saxon — even as the majority of speakers use "Saxisch" as their term of choice.

Phonology
The phonology of the Wessiȝ dialect of Henton Saxon is fairly representative of the language area as a whole. It reflects several very distinct southern English features, though it is generally free of the more extensive German influence exerted on more eastern dialects. It has 27 consonant phonemes and 13 vowels.

The twenty-seven consonant phonemes, along with their most common orthographical representations, are:


 *  * in a coda position, written without an intrusive vowel

The 13 vowels, in the vowel space:

Stress, Phonotactics, Phoneme Distribution
As is the general case among Germanic languages, Wessiȝ Saxon allows both words that are monosyllabic and polysyllabic. Not deviating from the common Germanic norm, it allows various sorts of consonant clusters and tends to avoid vowel hiatuses. Vowels are the only permissible syllable nucleus — epenthetic vowels may be inserted to break up clusters that do not conform to phonaesthetics, and often undergo syncope when a syllabic suffix is added.

Stress in words is generally fixed. Native words are always stressed on the first syllable of the root: the stress doesn't retract to the first syllable of a word when a prefix is added. Foreign loans, especially those that are recent or otherwise poorly integrated into the phonetics and lexicon of the language, may have stress on syllables other than the root initial: e.g. Latinate words tend to retain the stress they had in Latin. Saxon stress is a combination of pitch, loudness, and vowel quality: length is phonemic, and short vowels are quantitatively the same regardless of the stress.

A peculiarity of Saxon is that it generally disallows word-initial voiceless fricatives — the only exceptions are the clusters /sp st sk/ that have a voiceless sibilant, certain loans such as  /fra:ns/, and words influenced by loans, such as /frank/. The fricative /ʃ/ is exempt from this rule as it lacks a native voiced counterpart.

Orthography
As with most English languages with a literate tradition, Henton Saxon has an orthography that is sprinkled with irregularities and odd patterns, stemming from its long history of development. It continues several prominent Old and Middle English scribal traditions and peculiarities, such as the retention of the ȝeoch and þorn.

Tradition divides the graphemes of the H&Ȝ standard into two groups: the vowel graphemes  and the consonant graphemes . The ȝeoch <ȝ> is counted as both a consonant and a vowel due to its erratic representation and usage.

The consonantal grapheme set represents the plosives /p b t d k g/.

The fricative grapheme pair maps to /v ɣ/, whereas the remaining pair can map to both the voiceless /f s/ and their voiced counterparts /v z/; while  is /v/ only initially, may be /z/ intervocalically, as well as word-finally in unstressed monosyllables. The grapheme  represents /z/ in native words, and the affricate /ts/ in loans from languages such as German and Italian. The grapheme <þ> represents /ð/, and occurs only initially. Word-internally, the digraph is used to represent /θ ð/. The digraphs represent /x ɣʷ/, and the trigraph represents /ʃ/. A few loans from French and Spanish have  representing the voiced /ʒ/.

The affricate /tʃ/ is represented by  word-initially — as native words do not have /x/ in initial positions — and internally. Its voiced counterpart /dʒ/ is represented by  in native words, where it is never initial, and by  in loans from Norman.

The grapheme  represents /m/ in all cases, whereas  represents a coronal /n/ only when not near velars;  followed by any of always represents /ŋ/, though the sequence  is ambiguous as to whether it represents the cluster /ŋg/ or just the nasal /ŋ/.

The duo represents /w r/ in all positions. The function and distribution of the ȝeoch <ȝ> is best covered as a part of the framework of vowel graphemes. The grapheme  represents /l/ in prevocalic positions (even when the vowel is silent or intrusive); it represents /ʟ/ in a coda position before consonants. The phoneme represented by  word-finally after vowels varies as /l~ʟ/ based on dialect.

The grapheme  generally represents /ks/ initially and /gz/ internally; some foreign loans may have <x> stand for /z/; this is usually the case with French and Venetian loans.

Digraphs are resolved first in non-compounds; compounds that generate such sequences may optionally be written with a hyphen.