Kijeb (Sohlob)

The Kejeb (Proto-Sohlob) sound system

Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Low		a

Consonants

	Labial	Dental or Alveolar	Palatal	Back
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])

Root structure

A Kejeb nominal or verbal root has the following structure:

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

where

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^[1]

. In pronoun and determiner stems, on the other hand, shapes like tat, kak, nan, sas are allowed and even favored^[2] . It may be that these stems were originally VC stems that became reduplicated.

▲:

The nominal stems mam "mother" and pap "father" being the only known exceptions.

▲:

There is also the numeral stem sas "one", but this may be a determiner in origin.

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.