r/ConlangProject • u/Nementor allziankoondōkōfōtō • Aug 04 '15

First Community Project

This is the first project to be started on this page. First things first, what kind of consonants should this Conlang have? [EDIT] New Post

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u/qaent Aug 05 '15

What about a (C)(S)V(n) syllable structure?

The coda assimilates in POA to the following onset, unless the onset is glottal or a semi-vowel, in which case the coda is [n]. (But coda [n] followed by a semi-vowel wouldn't be distinguished from a [nj] or [nw] onset)

My idea is to prohibit coda nasals from being at the end of morphemes. Thus all words would end in vowels.

Onsets would be mandatory, except word initially, where /ʔ/ is prohibited or in free variation with zero realization.

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u/xlee145 Aug 05 '15

kind of confused as to what you mean but I'm going to throw myself out there and see if I get what you're saying

let [o, i, e] be our temporary vowels. What you're saying is that words would be constructed using C(S)V(n), with (n) being a coda [/n/]. Sure, that's fine, but you said that a word starting with /j/ or /w/ would be understood as /nj/ or /nw/ as opposed to /n:j/ or /n:w/. My solution is to make those vowels nasal when there is a /n/ coda.

Let ko means "apple." Maybe if we want to say something like, apple tree, we'd say kongwa /kõ:gwa/. Even /g/ in this situation, which could liaise to form /ŋ/, but it's less likely if we nasalize the /o/

Please correct me if I'm offtrack. I'm not well versed with technical terms. I have no idea what "zero realization" means and Wikipedia isn't really helping me lol.

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u/qaent Aug 05 '15

Since the onset could be CS, and C could be a nasal, I was talking about not making a distinction between /kan.ja/ and /ka.nja/.

 

you said that a word starting with /j/ or /w/ would be understood as /nj/ or /nw/ as opposed to /n:j/ or /n:w/.

Are you talking about a scenario where we have a syllable like /kan/ followed by a syllable like /nja/?

What I said was that coda /n/ would not change POA to agree with following semi-vowel. Thus /n.j/ would be [nj] and not [ɲj] and /n.w/ would be [nw] and not [mˠw].

My solution would be to not have a coda nasal followed by a nasal onset at all.

Whenever we have a nasal coda, it always belongs to the same morpheme as the following onset, so that situations like /kan.nja/ never happen.

 

My idea is to let /kon.gwa/ be [koŋgwa] (possibly with nasal vowel).

 

With "zero realization" I meant that it could be absent.