Valyrio Bardion: Phonograms
High Valyrian, like any language, has several different sounds, including six vowels and several consonants which only occur in loan words.[1] In my writing system, none of the sounds found only in loanwords (/x/, /θ/, /ʃ/ and /f/) have their own letters. They are written as [k], [t], [s] and either [v] or [p]. So while in a transcription we might use “arakhi” or “Thoros”, in my script, they would be written as “araki” and “Toros”. All the other sounds – with the exception of /ʎ/, which is transcribed as “lj” and written with the Valyrian letters L and J – get their own letter. /ʎ/ tends to occur in places where declination or conjugation can change its sound to a different one, for example “vōljes” (raven) becomes “vōlī” when it is an accusative object, and the most famous example of the verb “morghūljagon” is the greeting “Valar morghūlis”. Hence, I decided to keep the letter combination from the transcription and have the sound be the only one that is represented by two letters instead of one.
All the letters are shortened versions of logograms that contain that specific sound, normally (but not always) at the beginning. For example [a] derives from “ābra” (woman) and [u] derives from “hūra” (moon). The six vowels are written as follows:
| a | e | i | o | u | y |
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All these are simple, short vowels. Since all High Valyrian vowels come in both a short and a long version, the basic letters were adapted to reflect that with a simple, short horizontal line added to them. This results in the following letters:
| ā | ē | ī | ō | ū | ȳ |
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The same principle is also applied to some of the consonants, some of which can be doubled too. The exception to it is “zz”, since it so far has only occurred in the word “ozzālagon” (to burn away), a combination of the prefix “oz-” and the verb “zālagon” (to burn). Verbs tend to have their own logograms and affixes are often written as ligatures even if the writer does use the phonetic system, so there was never enough of a need for a letter “zz”. In the event that a sentence is rendered entirely in phonograms, it letter “z” is simply doubled.
The single and doubled consonants are:
| l | m | n | r | s | t |
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| ll | mm | nn | rr | ss | tt |
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And, last but not least, the remaining consonants:
| b | d | g | gh | h | j | k |
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| ñ | p | q | rh | v | z | |
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Now, to demonstrate how a sentence would look if only written phonetically, I’ll demonstrate it using the example of “Valyrio muño ēngos ñuhys issa” – “Valyrian is my mother tongue.”
If not written using letters, it would look like this, however:
[1] https://wiki.dothraki.org/High_Valyrian_Phonology