PhonoDokunetics—Triple Mini LingDoku
Ulfheðnar
ber Sarkur
(with the
“assistance” of
Arexadnel Sasquashington)
ꜧʘɬɤɣo—previously an only moderately vulnerable Lemurio-Atlantean language—suddenly went extinct in 1987, when the last remaining 7,493 speakers were all tragically killed during an excessively accurate historical re-enactment of the destruction of Pompeii—which had been the ancient sister city of Ịɪ̣әdɯod, the mythological birthplace of the ꭜʘɬɤɣo people and their language.
Fortunately, I had done a considerable amount of fieldwork among the ꭜʘɬɤɣo during the 1960s—though my findings were never properly organized, let alone published. I was unmotivated, as it seemed to merely be a fairly run-of-the-mill Lower Lemurio-Atlantean language, with the typical contact-induced grammaticalization of eyebrow postures calqued from nearby Hyperborean Primate Sign Languages used by the local population of Überlinguistaffen (who had oft been employed by the ꭜʘɬɤɣo to perform routine computational linguistics tasks since the late 1700s).
The only vaguely interesting feature of the language is its vowel system. Phonetically, ꭜʘɬɤɣo has thirty-six vowels; phonologically... I’m not sure. There are six vowel lengths: ultra-short (◌̆̆), extra-short (◌̆), half-long (◌ˑ), long (◌ː), sesquilong (◌ːˑ), and twissellong (◌ːː)—I swear that very exact measurements of vowel length indicated there were no vowels of mere unmarked “short” length! There are six tones: low (◌̀), mid (◌̄), high (◌́), extra-high (◌̋), rising (◌̌), and falling (◌̂). Oddly, all ꭜʘɬɤɣo vowels are front and unrounded, though there are six vowel heights—close (i), near-close (ɪ), close-mid (e), open-mid (ɛ), near-open (æ), and open (a).
The most remarkable feature of the vowel system is its relative non-compositionality. Imagine the fully realized 6×6×6 feature space with 216 phonetically distinct vowels—a worthy complement to Caucasian consonants such a system would be, indeed! But, no. Rather, ꭜʘɬɤɣo has a mere thirty-six—more than enough to keep any phonetician busy, ’tis true—but there is almost no systematicity to the extant combinations of available features that I could discern, and I was never able to work out any scheme of underlying phonemic forms at all!
Around 2006, I hired a grad student, Arexadnel Sasquashington, to attempt to organize my ꭜʘɬɤɣo notes for possible publication. SuDoku was all the rage at the time, and Rex claimed that while he had made little progress in finding any reasonable (or even unreasonable) phonemic principles by which to explain this mess, he was able to arrange the vowels in such a way that their height, length, and tone each independently followed the constraints of a mini SuDoku (confusingly also known both as a “3×2” and as a “6×6” SuDoku)—though not every combination is entirely distinct... I recall him being irrationally disappointed that there are two twissellong near-close vowels, for example.
At the time, I thought little of the SuDoku connection—other than fuming a bit that I was not paying Rex to come up with such irrelevant “insights”. However, after my office was hit hard by The Great Coffee Flood of 2022, I found that all of my notes detailing the vowel system of ꭜʘɬɤɣo have been rendered unreadable—that high octane blend they serve in the staff caff ate the ink right off the page! All I have left is a single badly damaged copy of Rex’s SuDoku-like array of vowels, presented below (with a reconstructed grid).
My hope is that—given the constraints of this ridiculous intriguing vowel system and the assumption that Rex’s ability to recognize SuDoku-like patterns is as good as he thinks it is—someone will be able to reconstruct the full list of attested ꭜʘɬɤɣo phonetic vowels. (Note that the name “ꭜʘɬɤɣo” doesn’t actually contain any ꭜʘɬɤɣo vowels! The exact etymology is unclear, but it seems to have been borrowed into Greek from an unidentified Upper Meropean language; several ancient sources claim it means something akin to μηχαφωνηενζιλα, without expanding on what μηχαφωνηενζιλα itself might mean.)
If you think you can help Dr. ber Sarkur recover his lost vowel data, submit your solution to the editors of SpecGram by August 21st, 2025. Solutions, if any, and solvers, if any, will be announced in the next issue.
