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K'th's

K'th's is the old language of the realm of K'th'ith'h, and is now nearly defunct, spoken only in matters of gravest business or any other time secrecy of intent is necessary. At the height of the K'thian culture, only about 73% of the native population clearly had a mastery of the language.

Despite the devestation of the Vampyric Wars on the region, some pieces of K'thian literature still survive.

The Linguistics of K'th's

K'th's itself contains interesting linguistics.

Vowels

The language contains only two vowel sounds. A vowel sound in a word is indicated by an apostophe. The first apostophe in a word, known natively as the Pr'm' P't'r, carries the vowel sound of an open-mid front unrounded vowel (IPA symbol /ɛ/). Every proceeding apostrophe, known as the L'w P't'r, holds the value of a near-open front unrounded vowel (IPA /æ/).

Consonants

Consonants are predominantly the same as our English, however there are a few slight changes. A "t" character actually indicates a voiceless bilabial plosive (IPA /p/). A "th" characterization therefore becomes a voiceless labiodental fricative (IPA /f/). A character of "p" holds a voiceless velar plosive sound (IPA /k/), "f" holds either a voiced or voiceless dental fricative (IPA /ð/ and /θ/ respectively) and a character of "k" is a labial-velar approximant (IPA /w/). Finally, the character of "w" is a voiceless alveolar plosive (IPA /t/). The other characters we traditionally associate with vowel, that is "a", "e", "i", "o" and "u" all hold dirrefent sounds than we would associate them to be. As the only two vowel sounds in K'th's are the Pr'm' P't'r and the L'w P't'r these characters all hold consonant sounds. "a" is a voiced bilabial fricative (IPA /β/), "e" is a labiodental approximant (IPA /ʋ/), "i" is postalveolar click (IPA /ǃ/), an "o" is a voiceless alveolo-palatal fricative (IPA /ɕ/) and finally "u" is a voiced glottal fricative (IPA /ɦ/). Most words, thankfully, steer away from these characters/sounds.

Examples

So then, the preceeding poem as transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet would appear as follows: