Seuna : Chapter 1

Consonants

These are the 17 consonants. All these sounds will be familiar to English speakers apart from "@". The ampersand "@" is used here to represents the glottal stop although some would argue that it would have been better to use the I.P.A. (International Phonetic Alphabet) symbol " ʔ ". The glottal stop is a consonant found in many languages. In English the feature is represented, for example, by the hyphen in uh-oh! and by the apostrophe in Hawaiʻi among those attempting an authentic pronunciation of that name.

The 17 symbols chosen to represent these 17 consonants are more or less copied from Tibetan. These symbols were chosen as it was felt that : although all 17 symbols were very distinct from each other, at the same time they seemed to share a common theme.

There is no correspondence between the phonetic values given here and how they are pronounced in Tibet.

Also there is also no correspondence between how a sound "feels" and how it is written. If there was such a correspondence "s" would be extremely smooth, the nasals would be quite smooth and "k", "p" and "t" would be extremely angular. This does not happen.

There is no scheme that gives these symbols common elements corresponding to common articulation methods. However it can be noted that "b", "p" and "m" have a common element. As do "h" and "@". Also "g" and "y" are quite similar and diachronically "g" => "y" is quite a common sound change.

Vowels

The vowel marks are given below. They are written above the consonants that they follow so for demonstration purposes only, here they are shown over the consonant "d" .

Vowel clusters

The six diphthongs that are made up of combinations of two of the above simple vowels are shown below.

The two diphthongs that are made up of combinations of three of the simple vowels are shown below.

Consonant clusters

Word-initial constant clusters

In the same way that you can get sequences of vowels to flow into each other and produce diphthongs, clusters of consonants can occur. Given below is a list of consonants and consonant clusters which are allowed to start a word. There are 37 (45₈) of them.

@
m	my
y
j			jw
f	fy	fl
b	by	bl	bw
g		gl	gw
d			dw
l
c			cw
s		sl	sw
k	ky	kl	kw
p	py	pl
t			tw
w
n	ny
h

z is an allophone of s ... when inside a word and before a voiced consonant.

ʃ is also an allophone of s ... when before the front vowels i or ia.

ŋ is an allophone of n ... when followed by k or g.

The post-alveolar affricates are represented here by c and j, are the initial sounds of "Charlie" and "Jimmy" respectively. .

The consonant r is exceptional in that it only occurs in suffixes attached to active verbs.

An off-gesture (or off-flurish) is when a consonant is immediately followed by "y","l" or "w". Off-gestures only occur word initially and are restricted to certain letters (see "initial consonant clusters" in "Seuna word shape"). The off-gesture is indicated by a mark placed just to the top right of the main figure (see below).

Mid-word constant clusters

The single consonants and consonant combinations given below are allowed word internally. There are 53 of them.

@

m

y

j

f

b

g

d

l

c

s

k

p

t

w

n

h

lm

ly

lj

lf

lb

lg

ld

lc

ls

lk

lp

lt

lw

ln

ny

nj

nf

mb

ŋg

nd

nc

ns

ŋk

mp

nt

mw

sm

sy

sb

sg

sd

sl

sk

sp

st

sw

sn

Actually the clusters -sm- -sy- -sb- -sg- -sd- -sl- -sw- and -sn- would be better represented by -zm- -zy- -zb- -zg- -zd- -zl- -zw- and -zn-.

An on-gesture (or on-flurish) is when a non-initial-consonant is preceded by "l", "s" or "n". These on-gestures co-occur with most consonants but a very few combinations are disallowed(see "mid consonant clusters" in "Seuna word shape").

The on-gesture is indicated by a mark placed just to the left of the figure that they are combined with(see above).

End-word constant clusters

Actually most words are only two syllables long. However about 30 % have three syllables. For this third syllable, only the 17 simple consonants are allowed.

@

m

y

j

f

b

g

d

l

c

s

k

p

t

w

n

h