Tag: challenge

		Bilabial	Dental	Retroflex	Velar	Uvular
	fortis	p’	t’	ʈ’		q
	mid	pʰ	tʰ	ʈʰ
plosives	lenis	p	t	ʈ	k
	voiced	b	d	ɖ	g
nasals		m	n		ŋ
fricatives			s	ɕ~ʂ
liquids		w		ɾ~ɽ~l~ɭ		χ

This was the second consonant inventory I did, and I wanted it to have many contrasts and some ejectives. So I went with this one. For the dorsal consonants I shifted the fortis and mid consonants a bit, they became /q/ and /χ/ respectively. The huge free variation in retroflex liquids is just a bit of rhotacism on my side – they all sound the same either way :p

I didn't want to go excessively crazy with the vowels, so I made a four-vowel system and lowered the front vowels a bit and introduced a vowel length distinction.

	Front	Center	Back
High	ɛ ɛː		u uː
Mid	e eː
Low		a aː

That table isn't that accurate but I'm sure you know what I mean. I didn't bother with phonotactics that much this time, so here is the romanization.

		Bilabial	Dental	Retroflex	Velar	Uvular
	fortis	p'	t'	rt'		q
	mid	ph	th	rth
plosives	lenis	p	t	rt	k
	voiced	b	d	rd	g
nasals		m	n		y
fricatives			s	c
liquids		w		l		h

	Front	Center	Back
High	e ē		u ū
Mid	i ī
Low		a ā

Yeah I know <y> /ŋ/ is a bit weird and all but I like it, feels very un-Eylish. This was today's four-day-ago's apad! See ya next time! Ūrthca!

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	ï
Center	a	ä
Back	u	ü

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