• Usiren
• Unicornic

Articulatory Phonetics

Unicorns differ from humans and giants in their organs of speech. Some of the differences are quantitative, others qualitative: the roof of the mouth of a unicorn is longer than that of a human, and permits more places of articulation to be distinguished. In the Shunhaurat, tonality is rare in human languages; in unicorn languages it is effectively ubiquitous as unicorns use their hornsounds extensively (outside of trade pidgins), a qualitative difference representing a formidable obstacle to non-unicorns undertaking to speak unicorn languages. Human tonal languages often involve pitch contour, a feature that does not appear in unicorn languages as a contrasting feature. Most unicorns do not have fine temporal control over laryngeal phonation, and their languages do not distinguish phonemes based on voicing (though some unicorn languages may have whole syllables be laryngeally unvoiced). Most unicorn languages only feature stops at the beginning of syllables.

Unicorn languages do not distinguish vowels by rounding. No unicorn language distinguishes more than six vowels, and they commonly have far fewer, usually two or three. Diphthongs are uncommon, though unicorns do not have exceptional difficulty acquiring them. Unicorn languages do not have laterals.

The unicorn horn has five sphincters, the closing of which determine its acoustical length and hence the pitch at which it sounds. The sphincters close sequentially. An interval is usually formed with the vibration of the larynx, which often has linguistic significance.

The sphincters being an inherently quantized feature (unlike places of articulation in the tongue), hornsounds are limited to fixed pitches. The hornsounds form the basis of a pentatonic (obviously) scale. Unicorns can adjust the pitch of their hornsounds slightly, permitting different individuals with similar horns to hornsing in unison, but hornsounds are essentially quantized. The ability to hornsing in unison with other unicorns is socially very important, so there is strong selectional pressure on unicorns to be able to match the pitch used by potential mates. Conversely, there is pressure to have larger and stronger horns for fighting. This has led to the sounding portion of the horn to attaining a high degree of uniformity, independent of the size of the nonsounding portion. Still, distant tribes of unicorns may be unable to hornsing together, and consider this to preclude close relations. The growth of a young unicorn's horn to a size where the adolescent can hornsing together with adults reliably in the normal register, is an important coming-of-age event.

Hornsounds can be overblown and come out an octave higher, though the use of the 'overblown register' as a contrasting feature is only seen in Wet Unicornic. All unicorns may overblow in hornsinging, however, and adults may overblow to hornsing in unison with their small children.

Some unicorn languages feature a sort of plosive articulated by closing the sphincters of the horn, raising the pressure of the corunal sinus with the diaphragm, and abruptly opening the sphincter.

Hornsounds can be concurrently articulated with oral sounds, and usually are in unicorn speech.

The use of hornsounds or the interval between the laryngeal tone and the hornsound often has a grammatical or productive morphological role in unicorn languages, though in some it is simply another sound of the language serving to distinguish lexical items.

Non-Unicorns Speaking Unicorn Languages

Hornsounds make it difficult for humans (and other non-unicorns) to speak unicorn languages. Conventionally, unicorns and humanoids have communicated in pidgins devised for that purpose, with simple vowel sounds and containing neither hornsounds nor complex phonation.

A sort of simple bagpipe has been developed to allow the production of intelligible hornsounds by humanoids, though any musical instrument tuned to an appropriate scale can work with some accommodation on the part of the listeners. An instrument that can sound a continuous tone is more readily intelligible, though.

A more subtle obstacle to ineligibility is the difficulty for non-unicorns to distinguish enough places of articulation. Usually, this can be overcome by context and careful annunciation where there is ambiguity.

Unicorns may also undertake to speak human languages, with varying success. They tend to have trouble with lateral and rounded sounds (e.g. [l], [w], [u]). Unicorn languages rarely contain labial sounds, though they are able to produce them. They are considered somewhat uncouth by most unicorn cultures, and in fact unicorns mocking human speech typically include an abundance of them.

Occidental Unicornic

Phonetics

Occidental Unicornic is dialect continuum spoken by unicorns in the western and central portions of their range. The remainder of this article will focus on it.

Like most unicorn languages, it is characterized phonetically by an abundance of contrasting places of articulation and few vowels.

Voicing is not significant. E.g. a whispering unicorn will use the corresponding voiceless sounds.

Vowels and diphthongs:

Consontants:

Hornsounds: IPA does not exist for hornsounds. We transcribe hornstops with a number followed by <'>, and regular hornsounds without the <'>. 0 is used for the hornrest.

Laryngeal Tone: Generally, the "default" laryngeal tone has a linguistically significant pitch ratio relationship to the hornsound. This may be in the same octave as the hornsound, or the octave below it. In occidental unicornic, this relationship has eight possibilities:

IPA has symbols for tones, but they are not really versatile enough to accommodate unicornic.

In the case of a hornrest, the number for the laryngeal tone is 1-5 corresponding to the pitch of the hornsound. In Occidental Unicornic, hornrest syllables only occur with the lower octave outside of marginal cases.

Examples of transcribed unicorn words can be found at the vocabulary page.

Grammar

Occidental Unicornic is an agglutinative language with tripartite morphosyntactic alignment and an unmarked word order subject-object-verb.

Oriental Unicornic

This language, really a continuum of tribal languages with varying mutual intelligibility, is spoken by unicorns in the eastern part of their range - as the name implies.

Wet Unicornic

Wet Unicornic is the language spoken by the "Wet" unicorns, i.e. those on the windward side of the Mountains of the Dawn marking the Eastern extremity of the known world.