Introduction

Shiptak (also Zistak, Shwaitak) developed from an archive of written English, Spanish, Mandarin Chinese and Russian, as well as limited recordings of spoken General American English.

Phonology

In careful speech, a word's pronunciation is kept the same as it's been archived. Although outside of careful speech, this isn't the case. Significant variation exists between different groups of Shiptak speakers, but the following sound changes occur commonly among most all varieties of Shiptak:

  1. /θ/, /ð/ -> /t/, /v/
  2. /ɛ/, /eɪ/ -> /e/
  3. /æ/ -> /ɛ/ (before a voiceless consonant) or /ei/ (before a voiced consonant)
  4. /ʔ/, /h/ -> ∅
  5. /oʊ/, /aɪ/ -> /o/, /a/
  6. /ɑ/ -> /a/ (b4 a voicelss consonant) o /o/ (b4 a voiced consonant)
  7. /b/, /d/, /g/ -> /p/, /t/, /k/
  8. /ɫ/ -> /o/
  9. /ɪ/ -> /e/ (when stressed or within monosyllabic words) otherwise /i/
  10. /ʊ/ -> /ə/ (when stressed or within monosyllabic words) otherwise /u/
  11. /ɹ/, /ɾ/ -> /ʋ/ and vowel roticity is dropped

Consons

Labial Alveolar Velar
Nasal m n ŋ
Plosive p pʰ t tʰ k kʰ
Affricate tʃ dʒ
Fricative f v s z ʃ ʒ
Approximant w ʋ l j

Vowels

Front Central Back
Close i u
Mid e ei ə o oi
Open ɛ a au

Lexicon

Most spelling conventions remain unchanged compared to those of Shiptak's source languages, although differences do exist: tak instead of *talk, smal instead of *small, cof instead of *cough, and sed instead of said to name just a few. No one universal orthography standard is followed by all users; contrarily, spelling innovations are encouraged. Below are some examples of common Shiptak innovations.