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becka_sutton ([personal profile] becka_sutton) wrote2012-08-18 12:07 pm

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.
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).

 labiallabio-
dental
alveolarpalatalvelarglottal
Stopsp pʰ
b
 t tʰ
d
 k kʰ
g
 
Fricatives  s
z
   
Affricates  ts
dz
   
Approximants wr lyv 
Nasalsm 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!