MOBIGLAS // XENOLINGUIST

XENOLINGUIST

The Xi'an speak in pitch. Feed in a human name and the rules engine renders it in Standard Romanized Xi'an (SRX) — spelling, pitch contour, and a pronunciation hint you can actually say.

LANGUAGE
Xi'an
Service Dialect
PITCH MARKS
3
low · falling · high
ENGINE
Rules
same name, same result
OUTPUT
SRX
romanized Xi'an

HOW IT READS

TRY YOURS
Anthony
To'nii
TOH-NEE
tonii

Pitch is punctuation in SRX: an interstitial . is LOW, ' is FALLING, and a trailing " is HIGH. Vowel length matters — doubled vowels and macrons lengthen.

GET STARTED

The Xi'an care about role over family name— a pilot is addressed as “Pilot To'nii”. Add your role on the next page to see it.

FIELD NOTES — THE XI'AN

They play the long game

The Xi'an live for centuries — Emperor Kr.ē has reigned since before the 259-year Cold War with humanity. Patient, hierarchical, and strategic, they prize restraint; cross one and it doesn't get angry, it gets "curt, succinct, and intractable."

Pitch is meaning

uo'aXy'an is a tonal language — pitch carries meaning. SRX (Standard Romanized Xi'an) repurposes punctuation as pitch marks because earlier human spellings kept losing the pitch and mangling the word.

Role over family name

A Xi'an doesn't care about your surname unless you're famous. You're "Pilot Harry" or "Teacher Mary" — your societal role matters far more, and a Xi'an will ask for it if you don't volunteer it.

The Service Dialect bridges the gap

Proper Xi'an lacks many human sounds, but nearly every Xi'an also speaks the Service Dialect, which supplies most of them. That's what makes adapting a human name possible at all — though clusters like "squirrel" still defeat it.

SPEAK A LITTLE XI'AN
Xē'suelen
formal hello, "with peace"
C.hak
casual military greeting
chō'a
thanks / appreciation
nyahai
friend
san
ship / vessel
s.oa
path / route
naithlūn
deep appreciation for something
Li"
one's life-path
Sourced from CIG's Xi'an Comm-Links — SRX, the Xi'an Dictionary, and Watkins' "My Name in Xi'an".