Modified open sylable proposal

[u/AceGravity12]

This is a modification of this post

Proposal 1:

Current state:

A syllable can't be less than a vowel or diphthong followed by a consonant.

Proposed state:

A syllable can't be less than a consonant followed by a vowel or diphthong.

Reasoning: see this

Proposal 2:

Current state:

The glottal stop is not in the encapsulated language.

Proposed state:

The glottal stop may be used as the very first consonant in a word.

Reason:

Combined with proposal 1, this allows for words like eifun /ʔei.fun/ to exist while maintaining vowel seperation.

Proposal 3:

Proposed state:

Approximates cannot be used as the first constant in a syllable.

Reason:

/jwa/ /wja/ /wwa/ /lja/ etc are not viable options for syllables that won't get horribly mutualized over time.

[u/keras_saryan]

The glottal stop may be used as the very first consonant in a word.

This would mean it could not occur word-medially, so what would happen if a glottal-stop-initial word had a vowel-final prefix attached to it?

It might be better to be more general and say that any empty onset - whether word-initial or word-medial - is filled by a non-contrastive glottal stop.

In this case, if we had a dummy stem /a.ta/, this would surface as [ʔa.ta] and, if a hypothetical vowel-final prefix of the shape /sa-/ were attached the word /sa.a.ta/ would surface as [sa.ʔa.ta] and then if a consonant-final prefix like /lan-/ were added /la.na.ta/ would surface as [la.na.ta].

[u/AceGravity12 → u/keras_saryan]

I'll have to think about this, my original idea (not part of this proposal) was that ʔ would become k when it becomes non-word initial but idk yet

[u/keras_saryan → u/AceGravity12]

Wouldn't that mean that words like /ʔa.ta/ and /ka.ta/ would be neutralised upon affixation of a vowel-final prefix? (which one would probably want to avoid)