Shotali

Shotali is a syllabic language, and makes use of sounds used in many other humanoid languages, as well as a clicking phoneme that is unique to their physiology. Sentences are written top to bottom, ordered from left to right. Its writing is calligraphic, written without picking up the brush every letter, with smooth strokes and clean ends of lines emphasized in good handwriting. There are 39 letters, not including those that can be altered with a diacritical mark.

A circular mark is present in letters that are pronounced with a click. This mark is not considered a diacritic, as the letters have no version without the mark. Characters pronounced this way are those with hard consonants: d, k, and v.

This same mark, however, can be used as a diacritic. Not included in the official alphabet, some characters can be altered to a harder form by adding this diacritic. The diacritic in this context does not indicate a click. Characters that can be changed include t-characters, p-characters, th, zh-characters, and j-characters. The latter two (zh and j) only began being adjusted with this diacritic after contact with sunlings, as a way to transcribe sounds in sunling languages that are absent in Shotali. With a diacritic, t becomes d, p becomes b, th becomes t, zh becomes z, and j becomes hard g.

A different diacritic, a horizontal line, is used to change some i characters to an e sound. Natural Shotali has three letters that can have this diacritic: ri, ni, and li; whose sounds change to re, ne, and le respectively. Contact with sunlings, however, has expanded the use of this diacritic as well, such that any character whose sound ends in i (pronounced ee) can be altered to have an e (pronounced eh) sound.

Shotali is written verb-object-subject. Adjectives and adverbs go before the noun or verb they alter. It does not utilize any particles or articles. Words are seperated with a circular mark at beginning and end, as are sentences with a linear one.

In the first image, you can see the anatomy of the first word 'sikosha' labelled. Each letter is designed to run into the next as it is written, but they are identifiable for their main center segment.