#also the reason between the changing of vowels is that the e & é are pronounced /ɛ/ & /ɛː/ and /ɛ/ & /eː/ in sindarin & quenya respectively | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

nabooro · 2 years

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A note on phonology and spelling conventions

The many people across many years who have worked on the names, titles, customs and places of and on Naboo have obviously done it with disparate backgrounds in mind, which is why you have several obviously Japanese elements and also names like Pooja. On top of that, some of the names that were introduced in novelisations and so on have gone for something in a very Western pattern.

A big example of this is the name Naberrie, which is pronounced na-berry and spelled with an ie, because... reasons?

English is an exception of a language for how it’s vowels and consonants shift pronunciation based on somewhat arbitrary spelling rules. Even Romance languages, which have a great deal of vowel shift, aren’t so inconsistent as English is. In English, Palpatine is pronounced pal-pa-teen because of convention, and that specific convention has evolved out of a history of vowel shifts.

Nabooro is not English, and it makes no sense to me for a language that (relatively recently in its history) shifted to an entirely different alphabet (or should I say aurebesh) to have the kind of spelling and pronunciation inconsistencies that English does. A written language should reflect sounds as well as meanings!

The way I spell out and write words in Nabooro is based on the sounds (you may notice a large number of â’s and é’s - that’s because English has only five vowel letters that convey a number of different sounds etc., and Nabooro has 9 distinct vowels with one assigned sound each)

Which is to say: I have maintained the spellings for canonical names like Palpatine or Naberrie, but those are not pronounced the way the rest of Nabooro is, and maybe they hold onto their spellings because they were crystallised in writing before they enacted spelling shifts in Aurebesh - that, or old, noble families simply refused to change they way they wrote and spelled their names even after the shift.

However, the rest of Nabooro follows certain patterns, which are as follows:

b, d, f, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, v, w are the same as English

c is always pronounced like /k/, except before y or ee, where it is like /s/

ch is a distinct letter to itself, pronounced like in English

g is always hard, like in goat

ng is a distinct letter to itself, pronounced like in English

sh is a distinct letter to itself, pronounced like in English

th is a distinct letter to itself, and is pronounced like thor rather than like that or the (i.e. θ not ð)

â is denoted by the Aurebesh letter aurek, and is pronounced /ɑ:/ , as in father or palm

a is denoted by the Aurebesh letter enth, and is pronounced /æ/, like in cat or bang

é is denoted by the Aurebesh letter esk, and is pronounced /eɪ/, like in mate or café

e is denoted by the Aurebesh letter onith, and is pronounced /ə/ (butter, filler) between stronger vowels and /ʌ/ (but, crumb/ when it is the sole syllable in the word.

i is denoted by the Aurebesh letter isk, and is pronounced /ɪ/, like in inch or hit

ee is denoted by the Aurebesh letter isk with an accent mark next to it, and is pronounced /i:/, as in sheet or pleat

o is denoted by the Aurebesh letter osk, and is pronounced /o/. Unlike in English, it is not dipthongised into /ou/

u is denoted by the Aurebesh letter usk, and is pronounced /ʊ/, like in foot or pull

oo is denoted by the Aurebesh letter orength, and is pronounced /u:/, like in loose or soon

#nabooro #.phonology #.spelling

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