Kijeb (Sohlob)

The Kejeb (Proto-Sohlob) sound system

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Low		a

Consonants

	Labial	Dental or Alveolar	Palatal	Velar
Voiceless stops	p	t		k
Voiced stops	b	d		g
Voiceless fricatives	f	s		x
Nasals	m	n		ŋ
Liquid		r
Semivowels	w		y (IPA [j])

Palatalization

An y after a consonant or cluster is realized as palatalization of the consonant, or all consonants throughout the cluster, but it does not seem economical to posit palatalized counterparts of every phoneme.

Root structure

A Kejeb nominal or verbal root has the following structure:

(s) (C) (r/w) (y) V (D) C (r/w) (y)

where

slots in parentheses are optional

V is any vowel (a, i, u)

C is any consonant

D is any dental (t/d, n, s, r)

There are some restrictions on possible phoneme sequences, including:

• Geminates do not occur. Thus e.g. if there is an s in a C slot there can be no s in the preceding s or D slot, resulting in an ss, and similarly no rr, ww, yy, tt. dd, nn.
• n + a nasal does not occur (no nn, nm, nŋ).
• Labial + w does not occur.
• None of yi, iy, wu, uw can occur.
• y can occur only directly before a vowel.
• In nominal and verbal stems the same consonant may not occur twice (the nominal stems mama "mother" and papa "father" being the only known exceptions). In pronoun and determiner stems, on the other hand, shapes like tat, kak, nan, sas are allowed and even favored. (There is also the numeral stem sas "one", but this may be a determiner in origin.) It may be that these stems were originally VC stems that became reduplicated.
• Roots consisting only of VC are extremely rare.
• Roots with a heavy cluster both before and after the V are rare.

In order to function as a stem such a root must be followed by a vowel. In nouns (including adjectives) this second vowel is a random extension, while in verbs it is an inflectional morpheme.