Orthography

Skerre is an oral language, so it has not traditionally been written down. The following orthography was developed by linguists working on Skerre, and will be used for the rest of this description. The orthography uses roman letters and is mostly phonemic. The phonemes of Skerre are represented as:

Vowels
	i	ii
			e	ee			o	oo
					a	aa

This orthography is very similar to the IPA forms (both "real" IPA and ASCII-IPA), except that /k^w/ is qu, /ʔ/ is ’, /j/ is y, and all long vowels are represented as double vowels, instead with the vowel symbol followed by a colon.

Phonology and Orthography

The phonology and orthography have what may seem at first glance an odd relationship: some phonological processes are reflected in the orthography and others aren't. However, the principle behind whether to represent a process or not is a simple one: if the process creates a sound that is contrastive in the language, reflect it in the orthography. Otherwise, don't. Thus, glide insertion, which inserts [j], [w], or [ʔ] — all of which are already phonemes in the language — is represented. So, /ana + ok/, grandmother is written ana’ok. However, the process that turns /sj/ into [ʃ] is not written, since [ʃ] isn't a phoneme of the language. Thus /s- + jas/, giver is written syas.

Another consideration comes into play: the orthography tries to maintain the general phonotactic shape of the language. For this reason, phonological deletions are reflected in the orthgraphy.

Here is how the orthography treats various phonological processes:

Reflected in Orthography:	Not Reflected in Orthography:
Deletion due to Prefixation Glide/Glottal Stop Insertion between vowels Final Deletion Coalescence that creates [ts]	Nasal assimilation Consonant cluster voicing Coalescence that creates [S] and [tS] Phrase-initial glottal stop insertion Word-initial glide insertion

There is a certain amount of arbitrariness to the above, but the hope, nevertheless, is that this orthography conveys the sounds of Skerre language with a certain aesthetic beauty.

Other Conventions

Besides using roman letters, this orthography uses many other writing conventions found in Western European languages. Sentences begin with capital letters and end with one of the following (depending on the type of the sentence): a period, a question mark, or occasionally an exclamation point. Commas are used infrequently, usually just for phrases that are left-dislocated. Hyphens mark units within compound words and the boundary between a host and its enclitics (proclitics are written as separate words). Direct quotes can be marked with either double quotation marks (“ ”) or guillemets (« »). The former follows US English standards; the latter follows continental European (non-French) usage.

In line with many recent grammars, the Skerre text will be in bold, interlinear glosses in plaintext, and English free translations in italics. The abbreviations found in parentheses throughout the description are used in the interlinear glosses. (See also the end of the Tower of Babel text for a comprehensive listing of abbreviations)

Forward to Section 7: Nominal Number Morphology
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