Rattssaw


 * "The administrative language of the Jesdic Senlis, Rattssaw is well known for its tricky application of phonemic prevocalisation (written using # for that matter), heavy use of tu-vous and strange loops in its registers."


 * - Isoraķatheð

Rattssaw (#rattssá, E.-Pasaru: E.-Ëratťtsauu ) is the administrative language of the Jesdic Senlis. It has two distinct variants: Low Rattssaw (#saalittrattssá) for the government and Popular Rattssaw (#kangpritrattssá) for the general populace.

Phonology
The phoneme /ʔʱ͡ə̌/, written ⟨#⟩ and known as the Sharpsign, has a special function in Rattssaw. In most cases, it may only ever occur at the beginning of words, and when it does, its function is similar to that of the definite article in English.

Prosody
Rattssaw operates under a system of syllabic denial, meaning that words are split into phonoruns instead of syllables, and that the prosody of Rattssaw words is based on these runs. Rattssaw phonemes are grouped into one of three categories, open (þhaər), closed (skkdþ) or inheritable (fflayer). Inheritable phonemes inherit the class of the preceding phoneme, and become closed when word-initial in the standard language.

A phonorun in Rattssaw consists of strings of phonemes of only one class, meaning an open phonorun may only consist of open and inheritable phonemes and a closed phonorun only of closed and inheritable ones. Thus, the word Rattssá consists of four phonoruns: closed r, open a, closed ttss and open á.

Phonorun prosody, as in the amount of time it takes to pronounce a phonorun, is determined by the prosody equation T = KnL + νn, with T being the total duration of a phonorun in seconds, n being the number of phonemes in the run, K controlling the overall speed of speech which can vary considerably from speaker to speaker, L being the "starting constant" and ν being the "corrective constant", both of which are dependent on language and dialect but generally bounded as 1 < L ≤ 5/4 and 0 ≤ ν ≤ 1/40. For a specific dialect of Rattssaw, these values are L = 5/4 and ν = 1/48, while K is around 0.1. Thus, the total duration of the word Rattssá in that specific dialect is 0.1 s (R) + 0.1 s (a) + 0.245 s (ttss) + 0.1 s (á) = 0.545 seconds.

Vocabulary
See Category:Rattssaw words

Out of universe
Rattssaw was first described in Book 14, Page 53a.