Round Robin Conlang/Observations

Thought I'd look at what our phonology looks like so far. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah

Basic inventory

Consonants

		Labial	Coronal		Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Stops / affricates	Ejective			tsʹ	kʹ
	Voiceless	p	t	ts	k	q
	Voiced	b	d		ɡ
Nasals		m	n		ŋ
Fricatives	Voiceless	f	s			χ	h
	Voiced	v
Liquid			l

Semivowel (?) /j/

Vowels /i e ɛ a ɔ o u/; /oi/; possibly /ai/ (seriously now, is "they two" [tsoi] or [tsai] ?) For purposes of vowel-harmonic suffixes, /a/ (phonetically open central [ä]?) counts as a back vowel.

Tone High and low. Low is unmarked.

Lenition

The following changes are attested:

Original	p	b	t	n	g	q
Lenited	f	v	s	ð̃	ɣ	χ

[ð̃ ɣ] have only been attested under spirant lenition thus far.

I would presume the process to apply regularly also to the "missing" buccal stops / nasals, ie. m, ŋ, d, k → ṽ, ɣ̃, z (ð? l??), x. /s, j/ appear to be unchanged under lenition as seen from gɔso, vijes. Whether the other consonants do anything remains to be seen.

Other alternations

Gemination appears to be regular for at least lenitable consonants, with bb, tt, nn, gg, ŋŋ attested. /tsʹ, s/ appears to resist gemination as seen from betsʼaq, ísasaq.

There is also prenasalization (apparently identical with gemination for nasals).

It appears that we have four grades of consonants, plain, lenited, geminated and prenasalised, realisations of which may overlap. Roots appear top contain only plain consonants. --PeteBleackley 17:00, 13 January 2010 (UTC)

Syllable structure

Thus far (C)V(N)(C) seems sufficient (maximal example: boimb). Only clusters of two consonants have been observed medially, even them limited to geminates and nasal + consonant.

Root structure

Segments appearing in verbal roots might be drawn from a more restricted set than all consonants. No voiceless fricatives aside from /s/, or /ts, l/, appear in any of the verb roots attested so far, and neither do /ɛ, ɔ, o/. AlexFink