apadchall #1 – a click-y start

As I'm adding the first apadchalls retroactively, I'll go over the thought process I had back then. Overall I wanted to make large phoneme inventories, as Old Ataman's one is rather small. So for the first one, I wanted to implement some click consonants. Maaanny clicks and few actual pulmonic consonants. I made a austronesian pulmonic peripheral inventory, and then added 20 phonemic clicks.

Labial Velar
Plosives p~ʔ k
Nasals m ŋ
Labial Dental Palatal Lateral
plain ʘ ǀ ǂ ǁ
prenasalized ᵑʘ ᵑǀ ᵑǂ ᵑǁ
breathy ʘʱ ǀʱ ǂʱ ǁʱ
prenas. breathy ᵑʘʱ ᵑǀʱ ᵑǂʱ ᵑǁʱ
preglottalized ˀʘ ˀǀ ˀǂ ˀǁ

Yum! I can't pronounce half of them clicks but anyways they're cool! Now onto the vowels: again, I wanted something different than say a simple three- or four-vowel system. So I went with tense-lax vowel harmony and three vowels:

Tense Lax
Front i ɪ
Center ɑ ɐ
Back u ʊ

I could've stopped at this point, but I felt like doing some more phonotactics and allophony would help me to get a feeling for this aesthetic. I defined the syllable structure as {X/C}V(C), where X is a click and made the following rules.

  1. A click assimilates in PoA with an adjacent consonant
  2. A click is preglottalized after a nasal

I furthermore declared that there won't be stress and tried to create a fitting romanization. This is what I came up with:

Labial Velar
Plosives p k
Nasals m g
Labial Dental Palatal Lateral
plain x t c l
prenasalized nx nt nc nl
breathy xh th ch lh
prenas. breathy nxh nth nch nlh
preglottalized qx qt qc ql
Tense Lax
Front i
Center a ä
Back u ü

So here we go... apad #1 - Done! Chignta!

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