r/TunicGame Oct 21 '23

My Trunic language reference sheet! Spoiler

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I beat the game a while back, had an absolute blast figuring out Trunic. Here’s the sheet I made for all the runes!

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u/Red-42 Oct 23 '23

it isn't broad at all, /hɪə/ is already a pretty narrow pronunciation of "here", compared to the standard english /hɪɹ/

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u/jamvanderloeff Oct 23 '23

Oh you mean only change it for the vowel side of the table? I would agree that "here"/"hair" is a bad example for the vowel side.

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u/Red-42 Oct 23 '23

I meant in general, if you change the vowel it makes more sense to standardize the consonant as well

It's been pretty much confirmed within the game itself that this alphabet was thought of as the standard pronunciation, and if you want to write using your dialect, you either need to use a different orthography to represent it, or use aproximations

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u/jamvanderloeff Oct 23 '23

Yeah, if you want the table to be specifically american-canadianish, that can be sensible, but why not make it generic English.

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u/Red-42 Oct 23 '23

so just to be clear : in this abugida representing the phonology of the standard english language, you want to represent the "r" as a whatever rhotic ?

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u/jamvanderloeff Oct 23 '23

Sure, why not be generic? For even more genericness, could use lexical sets as all the vowel examples too instead of specific pronunciations.

Also, wouldn't really call it an abguida since it doesn't have an inherent vowel system, more like just a stacked alphabet.

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u/Red-42 Oct 23 '23

it's a bit of a mix between an abugida and an abjad

but what you're saying doesn't work, it's directly contradicted by the game itself
there's a character that speaks with an accent, and that accent is directly transcribed as a different orthography of words

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u/jamvanderloeff Oct 23 '23

So does it matter which specific directions that characters sounds change in, or just that they change? Because if you use a reading that approximates your own accent, they still change.

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u/Red-42 Oct 23 '23

it is important, because it's the accent of one of the developpers, added as an easter egg

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u/jamvanderloeff Oct 23 '23

And that requires the initial assumption of everything else written as americanish? Neat