becka_sutton | 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!