Mercurian Common

Mercurian Common, known as [x] among its speakers, is the most widely spoken language of the Mercurian language family on Mercury. It is known as a language of commerce, trade, and international communication, with many non-Mercurians learning it alongside Human English and Mandarin to do business specifically in the Inner Solar System.

Notes

I think my thought process with this language was "wow, I wanna use labiovelars and simultaneously pronounced sounds as the main consonants in a language!" which is exactly what I ended up doing. The table below is actually the first conlang phonology table I ended up coding for this site. I'm very excited to show off the phonology on this one since I like to think it uses a lot of fun phonemes. It is, as you might say, very pleasing to my personal tastes.

Mercurian Common otherwise is going through slow development. My documents for this one trace back to its inciting development happening sometime in the latter part of 2019.

Work that still needs to be done:

• Evolution from parent to daughter language,
• Deciding on more grammatical things,
• Final touches on phonotactics,
• And building up the lexicon.

Last updated 8/9/2024. (Image last updated 8/12/2024.)

History

TBA.

Phonology

Mercurian Common possesses a lot of "fluffy" sounds, three voiceless nasals, and a series of labiovelar consonants. Of note is the fact that Mercurian Common has lost the Old Mercurian Common stops /p/ and /t/. Otherwise, the phonology is as follows:

	bilabial	labio-dental	alveolar	post-alveolar	velar	labiovelar	glottal
nasals	mh [m̥]		nh [n̥]		ngh [ŋ̊]	nm [ŋ͡m]
plosives					k [k]	kp [k͡p]
affricates			ts [t͡s]	ch [t͡ʃ]
fricatives	pf [p͡ɸ]	f [f]	s [s]	sh [ʃ]			h [h]
approximants			r [ɹ]	y [j]		w [w]
lateral approximants			ll [ɬ]

	front	central	back
close	y [i]		u [ɯ]
near-close	i [ɪ]
close-mid			o [o]
mid		ah [ə]
open-mid	e [ɛ]
near-open	a [æ]

This unusually front-heavy distribution of vowels evolved from Old Mercurian Common's much more familiarly naturalistic distribution of *y [i], *i [ɪ], *u [ɯ], *ou [ɤ], *o [o], *ah [ə], *e [ɛ], *uh [ʌ], *a [æ], and *au [ɑ].

Allophony

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Syllable Structure

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Loanwords

When borrowing words from other languages, the isolated /t/ sound tends to be substituted with /ch/ and the isolated /p/ sound with /f/ or /pf/. A word like chapperone from English might become shapffahrownh ['ʃæp͡ɸ.fə.ɹown̥], then, or shapffah ['ʃæp͡ɸ.fə] for short.

Voiced consonants, meanwhile, are optionally either substituted with their closest voiceless counterpart or left voiced in a Mercurian Common manner, depending on the speaker's proficiency with voicing foreign consonants. A word like video game, then, may either be pronounced vidyo geym ['vɪ.di.o gɛym] or pfichyo keymh ['p͡ɸɪ.t͡ʃi.o kɛym̥], or maybe even bvijyo geym ['b͡βɪ.d͡ʒi.o gɛym̥].

Sound Changes

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Grammar

Nouns

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Verbs

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Syntax

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Translation Gallery

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Lexicon

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