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

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.