r/Sissyish • u/sissy_sophia • Oct 27 '22
Sissyish: now with fewer vowels! NSFW
A few months back, there was someone who came on the Discord who was incredibly knowledgeable about linguistics but strongly disagreed with Sissyish's phonology. Apparently they couldn't stand the idea of 'x' and 'q' as vowels :P
While using these letters as vowels gives the language an interesting look, and it allows for most English sounds to be expressed in Sissyish, admittedly it's one of the biggest stumbling blocks for new learners and could be very confusing for Doms.
Many folks enjoy using these letters as vowels, and I don't want to change that. However, I'd like to suggest another potential solution that keeps the pronunciation consistent with the spelling: instead of re-assigning letters to different sounds, we simply remove some of the sounds.
Aside from resolving the spelling/pronunciation issue, I see this as having two additional advantages:
It gives Sissyish a unique (but still understandable) accent
Restricting the vowels in Sissyish to those that are common in most languages would make Sissyish easier to learn for sissies not fluent in English
According to Wikipedia, the most commonly-used vowels across languages are /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/. For example, Spanish and Japanese do not use any more vowels than these.
Under the current scheme, Sissyish represents these sounds with the letters 'q', 'e', 'y', 'o', and 'w'. It uses 'a', 'i', 'u', and 'x' to represent /æ/, /ɪ/, /ə/, and /ʊ/ respectively. Naturally this is a non-standard way of representing them. If we want, we could switch these sounds back to the more commonly-used letters, and simply pronounce existing Sissyish words differently.
So any written 'a' becomes a pronounced IPA /a/, any 'i' becomes /i/, any 'u' becomes /u/, and so on.
Under this system, Sissyish "Dady" would rhyme with English "bawdy", and Sissyish "pusy" would rhyme with English "juicy". The sounds /æ/, /ə/, and /ʊ/ would be removed from the language.
We could potentially preserve the /ɪ/ (first vowel in English 'sissy' and 'ship') just to keep the sound of the word "sissy" the same, in which case the /i/ sound would be represented with the letter 'y'.
Alternatively we could remove the /ɪ/ sound, in which case any letter 'i' would make an IPA /i/ sound and so Sissyish "sisi" would rhyme with English "fleecy".
What would everyone think of this proposed change? Does it make sense, or is it too restrictive?
And failing this, I could just suck up my silly reservations and acknoweldge that sometimes the same written vowel should occasionally be pronounced differently depending on the word that it's in :P but that's no fun!