Teixcalaanli is a vowel-heavy language with a limited set of consonants. A brief pronunciation guide is given below (with IPA symbology and examples from American English).
a—
—father
e—ε—bed
o—oʊ—no, toe, soap
i—i—city, see, meat
u—u—loop
aa—ɑ—The Teixcalaanli “aa” is a chroneme—it extends the length of the sound a in time, but does not change its quality.
au—a
—loud
ei—e
—say
ua—wɑ—water, quantity
ui—wi—weed
y—j—yes, yell
c—k—cat, cloak (but never as in certain)
h—h—harm, hope
k—kh—almost always found before r, as in crater or crisp, but occasionally as a word ending, where it is heavily aspirated
l—
—bell, ball
m—m—mother, mutable
n—n—nine, north
p—p—paper, proof
r—ɾ—red, father
s—s—sable, song
t—th—t, aspirated, as in top
x—ks—sticks, six
z—z—zebra
ch—tʃ—chair
But in consonant clusters (which Teixcalaanli favors), t is more often found as “t,” the unaspirated dental consonant in stop; l is often “l,” the dental approximate in line or lucid. There are many loanwords in Teixcalaanli. When pronouncing words originating in more consonant-heavy languages, Teixcalaanli tends to devoice unfamiliar consonants, i.e., “b” is pronounced like “p” and “d” is pronounced like “t.”
By contrast, the language spoken on the stations in Bardzravand Sector is alphabetic and consonant heavy. It is easier for a native speaker of Stationer to accurately pronounce a Teixcalaanli word than the other way around. (If one wishes to pronounce Stationer words one’s own self, and has only Earth languages to go by, a good guide would be the pronunciation of Modern Eastern Armenian).
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I began this book in the Cartel Coffee Lab in Tempe, Arizona, in the summer of 2014, two weeks into an intensive language course in Modern Eastern Armenian: my head full of the shapes of words that weren’t mine. I finished it in a bedroom in Baltimore in the high spring of 2017, too early for my wife to be awake, watching the light come in slow over the city: thinking about exile, and how a person almost but does not quite ever come home.
Between Arizona and Baltimore there were three countries, four cities, three jobs, and more help in the making of this book than I can easily describe. An acknowledgments section inevitably is a thin shadow of all the thanks which are deserved. But nevertheless: my eternal gratitude to Elizabeth Bear, who was first my friend and then my teacher and then my friend again, and who kept telling me I was entirely capable of writing a novel, and a good one, despite my protestations; to the rest of the ’zoo, on AIM or Slack or in person, for being the best bar, and the best place to learn to be a writer and a human being; to Liz Bourke, who accidentally sold this book, and who understood the project of it; to Fade Manley, who suffered valiantly through having the early chapters copy-pasted at her; to Amal al-Mohtar and Likhain, who gave me the courage to write about assimilation and language and the seduction and horror of empire, and who then challenged me to do better; to the Viable Paradise workshop, without which I would be poorer in friends and poorer in skill; to my brilliant agent DongWon Song, who saw this project for what it was and what it has come to be, all at once (& I promise not to do important business phone calls from Sweden next time); to my editor, Devi Pillai, who told me to go find the rest of this universe and put it on the page for you all.
And also my thanks to Theo van Lint, who showed me Armenia; to Ingela Nilsson, who didn’t mind when I wrote an SF novel while I was her postdoctoral researcher and supposed to be writing about Byzantium; to Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who welcomed me into both this industry and their hospitality; to my mother, Laurie Smukler, who was the first person who asked me whether I wanted to leave the academy and write instead, and thought it’d be a good idea; and to my father, Ira Weller, who gave me science fiction to begin with, when I was too small to know better—let there always be more “science affliction” for the both of us.
Lastly and most truly: Vivian Shaw, my wife, first reader extraordinaire, who showed me that stories could also be joy—thanks are insufficient, darling, but they’re all yours anyway, like everything else.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Arkady Martine is a speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. Under both names, she writes about border politics, rhetoric, propaganda, and the edges of the world. Arkady grew up in New York City and, after some time in Turkey, Canada, and Sweden, lives in Baltimore with her wife, the author Vivian Shaw. You can find her online at www.arkadymartine.net and on Twitter as @ArkadyMartine. Or sign up for email updates here.