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Hello! Welcome to Tune Text!

Here you will find a guide to each important sound and sound sequence for speaking the languages of Planet Earth.

You will also learn to read and write each base glyph, as well as the glyph variants to account for tone, clicks, and other variations of sound.

If you'd like to skip ahead and see all the sounds and sound sequences in one cheat sheet, click here.

Let's get started!

Vowels

We begin with the 3 base shapes, out of which all base glyphs are created. Click on each letter to hear its sound. These are the 3 key vowels.

  • i
  • a
  • u

Note that the IPA sound range for each glyph is included underneath, as well as our ASCII representation. This should give you a way to map from one system to the other if that helps you.

By rotating and flipping these 3 shapes, we get a total of 12 shapes, corresponding to the 12 base vowels.

  • i e u# E
  • a o U O
  • u o# A I

There are 3 more important vowels to learn, beyond these 12. They are written by adding a dot to a similar sounding base vowel glyph.

  • a#
  • e#
  • i#

Consonants

Now, to each of these 12 base square glyphs, we can add tails to 2 of its sides. This gives us the 24 base consonants. Click each to hear its sound.

  • m
  • n
  • q
  • g
  • d
  • b
  • p
  • t
  • k
  • h
  • s
  • f
  • v
  • z
  • j
  • x
  • c
  • C
  • y
  • w
  • G
  • '
  • l
  • r

So we have a total of 36 base glyphs, 12 vowels, and 24 consonants.

But these are not all the sounds you will need to make to understand and speak the Earth's languages. There are many more consonants. Here are the rest of them.

  • H (h with dot)
  • Q (q with dot)
  • S (s with dot)
  • Z (z with dot)
  • X (x with dot)
  • J (j with dot)
  • T (t with dot)
  • M (m with dot)
  • N (n with dot)
  • L (l with dot)
  • R (r with dot)
  • K (k with dot)
  • C# (C with dot, for Danish)
  • t!
  • p!
  • k!
  • K!
  • g? (g implosive)
  • b? (b implosive)
  • d? (d implosive)
  • p. p (stop, 2 dots on tailless side)
  • t. t
  • k. k
  • p@ p (tense, 3 dots on tailless side)
  • t@ t
  • k@ k
  • s@ s
  • d*
  • t*
  • l*
  • p*
  • k*

There are also some consonant-like glyphs which are actually sound modifiers.

  • h~ (h with double dot)
  • q~ (q with double dot)
  • G~ (G with double dot)
  • y~ (y with double dot)

We'll come back to those soon.

Sequences

Then there are a few important glyph sequences, which are divided into two categories.

The first category are sound sequences, which map directly to glyph sequences. We sometimes think of these as individual sounds, but in reality they are composed of parts.

  • tx
  • tx!
  • dj
  • qk
  • ks
  • dz
  • ts
  • ts!
  • tS
  • tS!
  • ao
  • aw
  • ay
  • Ao
  • Aw
  • ey
  • wi
  • ow
  • oy
  • aa+
  • aa-

There are more vowel sequences which you will encounter, but this gives you the gist.

The second category are sounds or sound sequences where the last glyph (on the right) modifies the main sound(s) (on the left).

  • hh~
  • kh~
  • th~
  • ph~
  • bh~
  • gh~
  • dh~
  • txh~
  • h~r
  • h~m
  • h~n
  • sq~
  • dq~
  • Cq~
  • tq~
  • lq~
  • ty~
  • txy~
  • lG~

That gets us through all of the sounds you will encounter in Earth's languages, at least to a rough approximation. This doesn't aim to give you a perfect native accent, as that is impossible to represent in a simplified writing system. Instead, it will give you a good foundation of speaking, which you can hone with real practice in a native environment.