šlama / textbook / how to read

Emphatic Words

In Assyrian, every word is either plain or emphatic. Emphatic words, marked by the symbol ⁺, are pronounced with emphasis. The main gesture of emphasis is the constriction of the upper throat. You already do this in English with the ‘l’ in ‘pull’. Notice how it sounds darker than the ‘l’ in ‘lip’. Every sound is pronounced dark in that same way under emphasis.

There are more subtle gestures as well that are a part of emphasis, such as the rolling of the tongue in the sound /r/. Most of these are noted in the alphabet helper thing above. The most drastic difference is in the sound /a/, which is like the ‘a’ in ‘pal’ in plain words and like the ‘a’ in ‘paw’ in emphatic words. If you only change how you pronounce the sound /a/ and nothing else, it will still be completely clear that you are pronouncing a word with emphasis.

In careful, slow speech, emphasis is applied over the whole word. Emphasis does not spread between words, but it does spread to enclitics, marked by a double hyphen ꞊ . In fast speech, however, emphasis is not always evenly or strongly applied.

Sound Switching

In English, ‘p’ will always sound tense after the letter ‘s’, e.g. ‘pin’ and ‘spin’. Similar changes to sounds also happen in Assyrian. In certain contexts, a consonant will swap its quality, but not mouth posture, with that of another consonant. This is extremely subtle, so if it is confusing then completely disregard this information.

A voiced consonant at the end of a word will swap its breathy counterpart

A breathy consonant right after a fricative will swap with its tense counterpart.

A breathy consonant right before a voiced consonant will swap with its voiced counterpart, and vice versa.

A breathy consonant will sometimes swap with its voiced counterpart when in between two vowels. This only commonly happens with the /x/ in certain constructs.

Village Variations

At one point in time, there were hundreds of villages in the Urmi region each speaking its own variety of this dialect. The varitieties of the northern region and those of the southern region pronounce certain consonants differently.

In the southern varieties, the sounds /c/, /c̭/, /g/ are pronounced /č/, /č̭/, /j/. To most speakers today, these sounds have become to a certain extent freely interchangable.

In the southern varities, the sounds /č/, /č̭/, /j/ are pronounced /ts/, /ṱs/, /dz/. To most speakers today, these pronunciations are completely unrecognizable.

Syllables

A word is made up of syllables. This writing system is descriptive enough that you can immediately predict the syllable structure of any word just by looking at it. Open syllables look like CV and CCV. Closed syllables look like CVC and CCVC. In principle, a syllable can only begin with two consonants if it is at the beggining of a first, although there are exceptions in loanwords. Vowels in open syllables have a long quality to them, and those in closed syllables have a short quality. Every word has a stressed syllable marked by an accent ◌́.

In principle, only /a/, /u/, and /ə/ can appear in closed syllables. The vowel /ə/ can actually only appear in closed syllables or syllables after the stress. To pacify these rules, there are many weird spelling changes that happen throughout the language as words interact with eachother. For example, it is common for /i/ to become /ə/ and vice versa as suffixes that change the syllable structure are attaches and removed. In loanwords or contractions, any vowel may appear in a closed syllable. Sometimes a syllable that looks closed is not because the vowel insists on being long. These vowels are specifically marked as long by the symbol ◌̄.

The default position of stress is the second-to-last syllable (not counting pathetic syllables). The accent ◌́ does not have to be written if this is the case. Often words combine together. The new group of words only has one single stress and should be read smoothly as a single word. The same with enclitics, except that enclitics do not move the stress or affect the syllable structure of words they are attached to.

If people are extremely confused by the ◌̄, it will be dropped from the writing system in the future.

Weak Forms

This writing system is extremely representative of the language. However, anumber of frequently used words and phrases have variant pronunciations that are not represented in the writing system.

Flattening Text for Instagram, TikTok, etc.

In today's technological landscape, languages that utilize non-ASCII writing systems often encounter limitations and compromises. For instance, all Ukranian and Turkish people cannot use their respective writing systems in their URLs or Instagram handles. Similarly, Assyrian will also face similar challenges. Therefore, it becomes crucial to establish a standardized convention for converting text into ASCII, which would allow for better compatibility across various cultural initiatives.