The Vehevionian Alphabet

Welcome to your first LESSON IN VEHEVIONIAN!

Before getting to learning any words, sentences, or even grammar, you’ll first need to learn how both Vehevionian looks and sounds. To have a smoother learning experience, we’ll use the romanization of Vehevionian, instead of the origianl writing system, known as the Vewattique.

The Vewattique is the writing system that’s used to write Vehevionian. It has many letters and sounds, but you don’t need to learn every single one of them right away! In this first lesson, you’ll learn the main letters that appear most often.

The most important thing to know about Vehevionian is that it is usually pronounced the way it’s written. So, once you know the letters and their sounds, Vehevionian becomes much easier to read.

Here are the basic letters with pronunciations using the IPA: (most are already familiar if you know the English alphabet)

A — pronounced ‘a’
B — pronounced ‘b’
C — pronounced ‘k’
D — pronounced ‘d’
E — silent/ ‘ɛ’
F — pronounced ‘f’
G — pronounced ‘g’
H — silent/ ‘h’
I — pronounced ‘i’
J — pronounced ‘dʒ’ (rarely present)
K — pronounced ‘k’
L — pronounced ‘l’
M — pronounced ‘m’
N — pronounced ‘n’
O — pronounced ‘o’
P — pronounced ‘p’
Q — pronounced ‘k’
R — pronounced ‘ɾ’ or ‘r’
S — pronounced ‘s’
T — pronounced ‘t’
U — pronounced “oo”
V — pronounced ‘v’
W — pronounced ‘w’
X — pronounced ‘ks’
Y — pronounced ‘ɪ’
Z — pronounced ‘z’

There’s also an important sound that’s written with an apostrophe:

• ’ — a small stop in the voice, called a glottal stop (ʔ)

You can think of it like the tiny break in the middle of “uh-oh.”

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Vehevionian also uses several letters which aren’t present in the English alphabet.

Ä — pronounced like “a” in a broad, open sound (ä)
Ü — pronounced like “yu” (ju)
Æ — pronounced like the “a” in “apple” (æ)
Ø — pronounced like the French “eu” sound (y)

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Some letters change sound when they appear together.

Here are the common combinations:

ss — pronounced ‘ts’
bh — pronounced ‘bi’
kh — pronounced ‘ki’
dh — pronounced ‘di’
th — pronounced ‘t’
ll — sometimes pronounced with a rare ‘ɬ’ sound

Congratulations! You just learned how to pronounce the basic Vehevionian alphabet!