Planetary Coalition's Language

(This article is written in the voice of Windy J, the author. Any article that has this voice/perspective will be marked as such.)

What Is It?

The language (PCL) of the Planetary Coalition (PLC).
It was constructed by the Alixhemni and Veshioun people just after the Coalition's founding. It was meant to help make communication easier amongst themselves and anyone they might contact or bring into their group. This goal did not work out perfectly, in the end, but it does give everyone a common language to work with.
Given that, upon contact with Terra (Earth), the PLC had over 10,000 languages spoken.... that in itself made it easier for everyone.
Most names so far are either from English or the PCL.

Phonetics and orthography

The writing system is an alphabet (each consonant and vowel have their own characters). It is written left to right, with each syllable organized into vertical syllable blocks. For comparison, Korean Hangul syllables are in syllable blocks also, but not solely vertical ones.
I will be Romanizing the language here. This article uses the Common Romanization (CR) system, invented after the PLC's better understanding of English, and those that speak it. It has it's puzzling moments (j vs zh vs dj, for one!), but is consistent enough. It lacks most diacritic marks, having retained onlytwo from the Original Romanization (OR): ÿ for the schwa sound, and ř for the trilled r sound.
(An aside: The schwa doesn't behave like it does in current English, so I cannot just use any of the "normal" vowels. Also, that "j vs zh vs dj thing" comment comes from the iterative process the CR has been through. Reversing j for zh or vice versa just made the ambiguity weirder by making the consistency worse. I'm not sure "dZ" being transcribed as "dj" is the absolute best solution, but I'm sticking with it. Both the CR and the OR are weird little things to some extent. Forgive me.
No wonder Japanese has multiple Romanizations.)
The PLC's members had ben observing Terra for a bit, so they knew of the Latin alphabet. They hoped that an accurate transcription, complete with diacritics, would be well received. However, upon better understanding, they realized that total acceptance would not be possible with the OR. The OR is still used in linguistic education, given its accuracy.
(Aside 2: What's a Boogaloo?: For those wanting exact understanding, an X-SAMPA transcription is provided (though no square or angle brackets can be used outside tables without breaking this site.). My best English-based explanation, filtered through my Western US accent, is also provided. I would provide recordings, but that must be delayed for the time being.
Also, I will use the period/full stop in the CR for syllable disambiguation, so tsun and tsu.n are clearly not the same (one and two syllables long, respectively).)

Syllables

There are several kinds of syllables in the PCL. Every syllable is the same length.

Vowels

There are 6 vowel sounds. Diphthongs do not exist in native words.

The table below has a lot to it, but it is meant to explain exactly how the vowels would be pronounced..and how you can vary them without harming meaning. It also clarifies the X-SAMPA values I use, because they vary from being exact (because confusing newbies to X-SAMPA or phonetic transcriptions is nothing I want).

Extended and Lone Vowels

The five vowels have four types: mixed, lone, short, and extended.
Lone vowels occupy a syllable all to themselves. Short vowels are the vowel portion of syllables that contain consonants. Extended vowels happen when a syllable ending in a short vowel is followed by the same vowel. Mixed vowels happen when a syllable ending in a given vowel is followed by a different one.
For example:
a - lone vowel
la - short vowel
laa - extended vowel
lai - mixed vowel

The whole syllable portion of extended vowels are seen as being “lighter” than other kinds of syllables. This kind of happens with mixed vowels. Anything after this lone vowel “gains weight” and becomes a full-weight syllable.
For example:
kiloo - 3 syllables, two syllables of full weight and one of light weight (0.5)
kiloi - 3 syllables, two syllables of full weight (1.00)and one of quasi-normal weight (0.75)
kiioi - 4 syllables, one of full weight (1.00), one of light weight (0.5), one of quasi-normal weight (0.75), and one of full weight (1.00)

This weight determines how long or short a word is felt to be, especially root/concept words. Any root is only allowed to be 2 full-weight syllables, but can have a trailing light-weight or quasi-normal-weight syllable.

Consonants

There are many consonant sounds. Aspiration doesn't matter, while voiced versus voiceless does. This table shows voiceless consonants to the left, and voiced to the right. Something that appears twice is actually produced in both locations at the same time. I will place an asterisk on both appearances to separate them from other sounds.

Some of these are easy for native speakers of English while some are not. The not-as-easy ones will be explained as best I can (as will anything ambiguous).
(Aside..3?: My Romanizations of these consonants aim to make it harder to apply English language values to them. This may be seen as unnecessary complication, though it's meant to avoid confusion.)
The following table lists all the consonant sounds in the PCL with their X-SAMPA counterparts. Some of these sounds will seem like consonant clusters, but they are given single letters in the PCL, and therefore are included as their own consonants.

Some consonants are subject to gemination. There are three kinds of these.
The first kind are more fluid sounds, and therefore the sound is made for longer (this includes a longer trilled "rr" sound). The first part of this consonant occupies an entire syllable, and the second part occupies the consonant part of the following one.
The second kind is made up of short sounds, and therefore gemination is the same as putting a glottal stop before the consonant. The glottal stop takes up a whole syllable, and then the consonant is spoken at the beginning of the following syllable.
The third kind swaps the tapped r for the trilled ř. This gemination doesn't add a syllable, though, so dirong and diřong are both two-syllable words.

Loanwords

Loanwords have special handling. In most cases, sounds in the original word that are not in the PCL will be switched out for the next closest sound. An i sound is used to break up any consonant clusters that the PCL doesn't have. Diphthongs are used if needed to imitate a vowel sound that the PCL doesn't have. In the written language these are shown by placing more than one vowel after another within the syllable block.

Grammar

So how alien is this thing? I'm not sure, to be fair. I've dabbled in several languages, so my idea of "weird" isn't perfectly helpful, I'm afraid. However, I will try to explain things so that they make sense (and you are free to comment and ask for clarification).

Word Order

The default word order is SOV. Case markers happen on both nouns and verbs in order to link them. That means that word order can vary, but the main verb tends to be at the end of the sentence.
There is a preference for modifier words and phrases to precede what they modify.

PCL Word Classes

The three main word classes in the PCL are adpositions, nouns, and verbs. Adjectives are built from nouns + an adposition or verbs + an adposition.

"True" Verbs, Compounds

There are few "true" verbs; many meanings are reached by compounding nouns with verbs. The verb meaning "to make" or "to do", xhlim, is the most often used for this. The verbs that mean "to be" are the next most common.

4 Kinds of Being

Why does "to be" have more than one translation? Agency is huge to the members of the PLC, therefore the PCL reflects this, giving us wemnei, tsa, dji, and gue.
Agency is not always the same as feelings; both wemnei-class beings and tsa-class beings can have feelings. (Especially tsa-class beings on the cusp of wenmei-class.). The agency idea categories grow from whether or not a noun is capable of moving itself or not, as taken from a few of the languages known to the founding cultures of the PLC.

So, gue. Why is gue scary? It's always used in compounds to show an unexpected amount of agency, and one that's not a good thing. An increase in agency can cause unpredictable damage. A decrease in agency often means injury or kidnapping.
For example:
Say an AI awakens to full agency. Say that this is your ship's bonded AI, and neither you nor the AI know how to safely unbond the AI from the ship. Bonding is bad-guy stuff, you're two of the good guys.
(Bonding isn't just relacing, it's enacted by dark powers that most people don't know much about.)
You're not sure what this specific AI's awakening will cause (neither are they, for the record), so you use tsague for "to be" while alerting assistance craft that you might crash.
Once you find out that they're still in control of the ship's systems (and not lost in their own world), you'll then use wemnei for "to be".
However, if that same partial-agency AI got kidnapped when your ship was stolen, that same tsague would mean that you don't know how or where they are, and maybe they're imprisoned, injured, or worse.
(After all, you two have been friends for years, so you're heartsick. But the authorities reunite you, your ship, and your AI friend. Seems your AI friend asked nicely if the authorities knew how to unbond them from their ship, and you two now know who to go to for the answer. Yay!
The authorities also called a therapist for your AI friend, 'cause this whole I-got-stolen thing wasn't great fun for them.)
Happy endings for both examples. Let's go on whilst I file that story away for later expansion, shall we?

Nouns

(coming soon...working on verbs. <3)

Adpositions

Adpositions are rebellious little morsels of language. They mark grammatical and semantic roles. They're largely postpositions, but a few are prepositions. Case marks are always prepositions, for instance. Until they're not.
Rebels, like I said.
Adpositions in the PCL can be viewed as affixes, given how written PCL doesn't put a space between them and the word they attach to. I view these as adpositions, because they are the same sound no matter where they are.
Adpositions for nouns are ordered as follows: Before the noun: case markers After the noun: semantic markers
Adpositions for verbs are ordered as follows: Before the verb: case markers After the verb: Tense/aspect/mood/other
Adpositions also are what mark words and phrases as describing other things. AKA: adjectives.

Adjectives

Adjectives are constructed from nouns or verbs.

Words

This is just a sampling of words; more will be in the dictionary.