Proto-Imperial

Phonemes

Consonants

The consonant system of Proto-Imperial is characterized by a large amount of plosives and affricates (here called stops), with 4 different manners of articulation: lenis, fortis, glottalized and prenasalized at 5 different points of articulation, as well as the glottal stop. On the other hand there are few fricatives, and no phonemic nasals.

		Bilabial	Alveolar			Alveolo- palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
			plain	fricated	lateral
Stop	lenis	p	t	ʦ	tɬ	ʨ	k	q	ʔ
	fortis	pʰ	tʰ	ʦʰ	tɬʰ	ʨʰ	kʰ	(qʰ)
	glottalized	ɓ	tʼ	ʦʼ	tɬʼ	ʨʼ	kʼ	qʼ
	prenasalized	mb	nd	nʣ	ndɮ	ɲʥ	ŋg	ɴɢ
Fricative				s		ɕ			h
Approximant					l	(j)	(w)

The central approximants /w/ and /j/ can be treated as consonantal allophones of /u/ and /i/ respectively.

Vowels

Proto-Imperial has three contrastive vowel qualities [i, u, a] at two different vowel heights (high, low). There are also two contrastive vowel lengths and a contrast in nasalization. This results in 12 phonemic vowels, shown below.

Oral, Long

	Front	Back
High	iː	uː
Low	aː

Oral, Short

	Front	Back
High	i	u
Low	a

Nasal, Long

	Front	Back
High	ĩː	ũː
Low	ãː

Nasal, Short

	Front	Back
High	ĩ	ũ
Low	ã

There are also 2 oral and 2 nasal diphthongs: aɪ, aʊ, ãɪ and ãʊ