A phonemic inventory of the Pelagine — first sketch

What follows is not a phonemic inventory in the sense a linguist would accept. It is an inventory of the sounds the survey's recording instruments distinguish; whether the Pelagine themselves make those distinctions is a different question, and the answer is, on present evidence, not always.

What appears to be distinguished

Roughly twenty obstruents — clicks, percussives, and several sounds that have no clear human analogue. Roughly fifteen continuants in two harmonic registers; the registers are themselves treated as meaningful in some contexts and merely stylistic in others. A small set of pitch contours that ride across phrases and may, in the Tyrian dialect, carry as much grammatical load as the segmental phonemes do.

What is almost certainly missed

The survey's microphones cut off above and below human-audible bands, and the Pelagine spectrum extends well into wavelengths the survey does not record. There is good reason to believe the recorded signal is missing a register. There is no good reason to believe the recorded signal is the full utterance.

The author's preference

To present this inventory as draft and let it remain so. A more confident sketch would be more useful to the survey and less honest to the matter.