User:Erimeyz/Beginners' Guide: Lesson One - Letters and Sounds
Justification
(TO DO: why learning good pronunciation is important - it's a spoken language, and it's exotic and beautiful-sounding (by design!))
The Na'vi Alphabet
The Na'vi have no writing system; their language is an oral language. However, Na'vi can be written using an alphabet based on the English alphabet (linguists call a language's alphabet its orthography). Frommer created the Na'vi orthography so that actors could learn to read and speak their Na'vi dialog from the script. Consequently, the Na'vi alphabet is similar to English, but with a few important differences.
The Na'vi alphabet has seven vowels: a, ä, e, i, ì, o, and u. Note that there are two accented letters, ä and ì, as well as their unaccented counterparts. Standard US and English keyboards don't have these letters, but there are several ways to type them. See Typing Na'vi for details later on; for now you don't need to worry about it.
The Na'vi alphabet has twenty consonants. Fourteen of them are similar to their English counterparts: p, t, k, f, s, h, v, z, m, n, w, r, l, and y. The other six are somewhat special. Five of them are written using two English letters each: px, tx, kx, ts, and ng. Even though they are written using two English letters, in Na'vi they are each considered a single letter and they each make just a single sound. The final Na'vi consonant is known as a glottal stop, and it is written using an apostrophe, like this: '.
In addition to the twenty-seven letters in the Na'vi alphabet, the language has six other sounds that are treated as individual "letters" in spoken Na'vi but are written using the other letters shown above. Four of those sounds are what linguists call diphthongs - sounds made by gliding from one vowel sound to a different one. The four diphthongs are ay, ey, aw, and ew. The final two sounds are called pseudovowels. They sound like consonants, but are elongated, and they act like vowels when used in words. They are written using the letters they sound like, but doubled: rr and ll.
Thus, the complete set of sounds in the Na'vi language, and the letters used to write them, are as follows:
- a ä e i ì o u
- ay ey aw ew
- px tx kx
- p t k '
- ts f v s z h
- m n ng
- w r rr l ll y
In English, a letter can have many different sounds. For example, the letter s has different sounds in the words sit, mission, and measure. In Na'vi, on the other hand, every letter always has the same sound. The Na'vi letter s always sounds like the "s" in sit. This means that once you learn what each letter sounds like, you will always know how to correctly pronounce any Na'vi word you read, even if you've never seen it before.
So let's start learning those sounds!
Vowels
The seven Na'vi vowels are pronounced as follows:
- a - baa (as in "Baa baa black sheep")
- ä - bat
- e - bet
- i - marine
- ì - bit
- o - boat
- u - flute or put (can be pronounced either way)
The Na'vi vowels have the sounds of the words listed above as those words are pronounced in the most common accents used in the United States, Canada, and England ("General American", "General Canadian", and "Received Pronunciation" respectively) - i.e. the accents used by television newscasters in those three countries. People with strong regional accents and English speakers in other parts of the world may pronounce some of the above words differently; in those cases, the listed words will not accurately reflect the correct pronunciation of the Na'vi vowels.
- Diphthongs
- Easy consonants
- Funny consonants - ng and ts, glides (contrast w/ diphthongs)
- Sidebar: stress
- First example words
- Hard consonants 1 - r, rr, ll
- Hard consonants 2 - glottal stop and ejectives
- Consonant clusters
- Second example words
- Useful words, simple phrases - hey, look, you're speaking Na'vi now!
