Leaper/Raspberry

The Gòranú language is a language descended from Khulls currently taking its name from discarded words that mean raspberry wine. That is, it is the next in a series of fruit-flavored language names that includes Apple Pie, Mandarin Orange, and Strawberry Icecream.

Phonology

This will be yet another attempt from me to create a language with a true vertical vowel system, spelled /a ə i/ for convenience but better understood as /a ɜ ɨ/. I had previously thought that to make a language like this I needed to have contrastive labialization on most or all of my consonants, but wikipedia:Abkhaz has a vertical vowel system with its contrastive labialization confined almost entirely to stops.

Contrast with other Khul langyages

Most Khul languages radically changed Khulls' highly unstable phonology; in fact, the early sound changes in most Khul languages made the phoneme inventory even more unstable, and therefore triggered even more rapid change early on, leading to final phoneme inventories that looked nothing like the original. For example, in Khulls voiceless aspirated stops were very abundant, outnumbering in speech the ejectives and the voiced stops combined. The Ogili language early on merged the ejectives and the plain voiced stops into a single category, and reduced the amount of aspiration on the voiceless aspirates, leading to a hypothetically more stable opposition of voiced vs voiceless stops. However this system turned out to be even more unstable, because in Khulls the most common ejective sound by far had been /ḳ/, which meant that in early Ogili, even with the primordial voiced stops added in, the most common voiced stop in the language was /ġ/ (spelled with a dot to differentiate it from the more common fricative /g/). This instability triggered another change: all of the labialized consonants became bilabial, meaning that, for example, /kʷ/ became /pʷ/. Since most primordial voiced stops had been labialized to begin with, this introduced a lot of /bʷ/ into the language, meaning that now the most common voiced stops were /bʷ/ and /ġ/. This still proved unstable, so labialization was eliminated, leaving Ogili with a lot of /b/ and /ġ/ but still nearly no /d/. However, these last two changes had radically transformed the sound of the language, since of the five contrasting places of articulation for stops, three of them were now realized as bilabials; that is, primordial /pʷ p t k kʷ/ had become /p p t k p/.

By contrast, Goranu's sound changes are conservative and often polyconditional, meaning that they appeared only when certain conditions were true.

Early sound changes

Note that /y/ represents IPA /j/.

Most early vowel changes were unconditional, like those of Khulls itself. This is largely because most morphemes are one syllable long and do not respond to sandhi processes triggered by neighboring morphemes.

Velars became palatalized before /i/. (Possibly exclude /ŋ/.)

/ʷi/ > /i/ unconditionally.

Probably /a e i o u yi yu/ > /a ya i ə ʷi yi yi/ unconditionally. Thus, there is a gap of */yə/, but this is no different than Khulls' own gaps. Note that primordial /u/ and /ʷu/ merge as /ʷi/, which is generally pronounced as a flat [u] with no audible glide at the beginning.

/r/ > /ř/ ... this is actually a spelling change, but is grouped with sound changes for convenience, since a new /r/ appears later.

Likewise, the postalveolar consonants come to be spelled as /ty, sy/ etc but this is not a true sound change. Note that at this point the language still considers labialization to be a part of the consonant but palatalization to be a separate sound occuring between a consonant and a following vowel.

/ʕ/ > /0/, which means that /ʕʷ/ comes to be seen as /lʷ/. However, there is no change in the pronunciation. Possibly, free-standing /y/ comes to be seen as /ly/.

Ejectives survive, unlike most other Khul languages, and some of them even make moves on plain voiceless stops.

All labials swallow palatalization (again). thus pya > pa, pʷya > pʷa, etc.

Seven position setup

Thus, there could be argued to be seven POA's for stops at this point: pʷ p t tʲ kʲ k kʷ. Frics also probably seven: s sʲ xʲ x xʷ h hʷ (hʲ would have merged with xʲ). Thus, labials can be united with glottals.