Conlanging for the Opal Mask - (supplementary post) phonology elaborations and additions

Elaborations

I'm conscious that simple saying the vowels are a, e, o and ā, ē, ō doesn't actually tell you a darned thing about how they are pronounced since English actually has a lot more than five vowels. British and American vowel pronunciation also varies a lot (and heck I don't speak Received Pronunciation myself) so simply giving word examples won't help.

The first part of this post will therefore deal with vowel pronunciation.

First note: The vowels with macrons are simply held twice as long like Japanese double vowels.

• a is the open front unrounded vowel represented in IPA as a. (There are sound files on the wikipedia articles but I find them none to clear at times).
  
• e is the open-mid front unrounded vowel represented in IPA as ɛ.
  
• o is the open back rounded vowel represented in IPA as ɒ.
• For the diphthongs i is ɪ and u is ʊ.

Hopefully that helps.

Additions

I'm adding aspirated stops  and a velar approximant (I seem to like approximants). I'm also correcting the position of another approximant from labial to labio-dental (which was always the sound I had in mind. I'm not especially happy with the current orthography for the labio-dental and velar approximants and have no idea how to orthographise (is this a word?) the aspirated stops. Any suggestions welcome). I've also added links to the wiki articles for each sound (except the aspirated stops).

	labial	labio- dental	alveolar	palatal	velar	glottal
Stops	p pʰ b		t tʰ d		k kʰ g
Fricatives			s z
Affricates			ts dz
Approximants		w	r l	y	v
Nasals	m		n

This gives me an inventory of of 20 consonants - which seems reasonable. English has 24, Rotokas has 11 and Ubykh had 84 (some of the Khoisan languages have even more).

Back later or tomorrow with words!

Conlanging for the Opal Mask - Nouning that Verb

(I should do a sneeze post for this lot soon).

In preperation for working out words for Language one I thought it would be a good idea to have some idea of how my nouns are structured as well.

So since I had that convenient verb just sitting there I decided to noun it.

So blanot is the verb dance (Hey I don't have an infinitive form... hmm) so presumably the root blan relates to dancing.

So to noun the verb I need to work out how this becomes a noun.

A thing to consider is that in this culture there are magical and non-magical dances. Magical dances will belong in the spirit gender and non-magical dances in the abstract so this gives me a chance to work out the suffixes for both of them.

So lets say -ago is the suffix for the spirit gender and -eka for the abstract gender.

• The word for a magical dance would be blanago.
• The word for a non-magical dance for entertainment would be blaneka.

But there's another two words we can get from this root and those would be the words for dancer. Now the word for human being will be in the sprit gender but words for people who do things will fall in the class that best fits what they do. So where you could use a an -er affix in English there is a -te- infix in Language One.

• A person who channels magic by dancing is blanteago.
• A mundane dancer is blanteeka (Phonotatics note - te-eka  with a slight hiatus between te and eka rather than -teka. It is likely this will fuse in the daughter languages)

Hopefully this all works because it's time to think of some other nouns.

Opinions?