Re: Thagojian phonology (was Re: oh no, not Tech phonology again)

>From: Paul Bennett <paulnkathy@...>
>Since I'm currently updating ang fiddling with Thagojian, here's VERY 'in-
>progress' updated repost of something I originally posted in October last
>year.  This is a much reduced set of consonants, there were originally 288
>'regular' consonants including palatalised and labialised versions, but
>these have been absorbed into the (semi)vowel system.
288, that's exactly the same number I got for stops, affricates, fricatives
and nasals (but not counting continuants).  And a very nice natural number,
since it's factors are 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 2 × 3 × 3.

>Emphasis
>   MN Reduced
>   NR Normal
>   MX Increased
>
>Type
>   SP Stop
>   FR Fricative
>   NS Nasal
>   GT Glottalic
>
>This results in the twelve MOAs listed below:
>
>MN-SP Voiceless Aspirated Stop
>NR-SP Voiceless Stop
>MX-SP Voiced Stop
>
>MN-FR Voiceless Fricative
>NR-FR Voiced Fricative
>MX-FR Voiced Affricate
>
>MN-NS Voiceless Nasal
>NR-NS Voiced Nasal
>MX-NS Prenasalised Voiced Stop
So "emphasis" results in more vocalization?  Change the voiced stops to
voiceless ejectives ("glottalized") and you get a system similar to Korean
(just the stops/affricates though).

Spirantization and nasalization in a similar fashion to Welsh, like I have.
Of course Welsh has only voiceless/voiced distinction.

>MN-GT Click
>NR-GT Ejective
>MX-GT Implosive
Remember that a clicks are not glottal in origin; they are velar.  Though
you could have an ejective click (double closure at the velum and the
glottis; that takes A LOT of practice).  And you have them in Khoisan
languages.

I was thinking something along the lines of "creaky, ejective, implosive".
Or the MN type could be released with a hard breath -- or even something
like the Arabic "emphatics", having a secondary pharyngeal articulation.

By the way, your prenasalized voiced stop/affricate corresponds to Tech's
nasalized ejective stop/affricate; it could almost be described as an
implosive nasal -- someone on the list has these too; who was it again?
These occur very frequently in Niger-Congo languages, including the Bantu
group.  Vai has a ton of them (and a nasalized /h~/ incidentally).  But Yi
has even more and it's Tibetan-Burmese!

>Along with the 8 POAs, these make a 12x8 grid, as illustrated below.
>
>Bilabial     ph  p  b    f  v  bv     mh  m  mb     p!  p'  b'
>Linguolabial p[h p[ b[   f[ v[ b[v    m[h m[ mb[    p[! p[' b['
>Interdental  t[h t[ d[   s[ z[ d[z    n[h n[ nd[    t[! t[' d['
>Alveolar     th  t  d    s  z  dz     nh  n  nd     t!  t'  d'
>Retroflex    t.h t. d.   s. z. d.z.   n.h n. n.d.   t.! t.' d.'
>Palatal      ch  c  j    s' z' jz'    n~h n~ n~j    c!  c'  j'
>Velar        kh  k  g    s, z, gz,    n,h n, n,g    k!  k'  g'
>Uvular       xh  x  q    s^ z^ qz^    n^h n^ n^q    x!  x'  q'
The first line makes sense.  But if you have /bv/, why not /pf/?  I've
always had the impression that if a voiced stop, affricate or fricative
exists, its voiceless counterpart would too.

I like your linguolabials by the way.  Turns out that some Tech speakers do
some crazy things with consonant pairs, like <pt> becoming lingualabial,
<kt> becoming a dental click, <kp> becoming a labiovelar double stop, etc.
And these can be voiced, aspirated, glottalized, nasalized...

Now your interdental and alveolars being distinct is realistic because it
exists in Dravidian.  But when I think of natlangs, I think of it being
confined to nasals, laterals and vibrants/rhotics (the three n's and l's of
Tamil, etc.).  And Basque has dental <s> and alveolar <z>, both unvoiced;
affricates <ts> and <tz> also occur.  However, I would add pharyngealization
as a secondary segmental to the alveolars, just as you do to lingualabials.
Egyptian Arabic does something similar to its "emphatics", whereas <t>, <d>,
<s> and <z> are pure dental, <t.>, <d.>, <s.> and <z.> are
pharyngealized/"backed" alveolar.  Rather distinct when you hear them
pronounced side-by-side.  (Vowel allophony also helps a lot.)

I have to take a brief aside for Tech.  I realized that when I had dentals,
retroflexes and post-alveolars (which I called vaguely "palatals"), and
listed their neutral, palatized and labiovelarized counterparts, I think I
ran into some overlap.  From my study of the phonologies of Abkhaz-Adyghe
and Chinese, I found that when retroflexes or postalveolars are palatized,
they become alveolar-palatal (the c and z with a curl on the lower part;
pretty much the same as [sj]/[Sj] and [zj]/[Zj] if I'm not mistaken).  Or,
the postalveolar series are probably automatically palatized, so they
probably have no neutral/labiovelarized variants in modern spoken Tech (in
particular, Qotilian and Maou dialects -- incidentally the latter has no
retroflexes at all).  For Chinese (Mandarin), see my previous post on how I
merged zh/ch/sh with j/q/x.

Also, your use of <s> and <z> for all non-labial fricatives might cause some
confusion, but of course our sparse Latin representation doesn't leave us
with much choice.  I ended up using digraphs and trigraphs that are pretty
cliché in the linguistic world (like "sh" for /S/, "kh" for /x/ and "ng" for
/N/).  For one thing, I just wish we had left the thorn (Þ þ) in our
alphabet so we'd have 27 letters!

Oh yeah, and you use all lower-case (case-insensitive) -- great!  I hate
mixing upper and lower cases just to mark phonetic differences.  To me, if
you're going to use Latin, Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian or whatever, an upper
case should represent proper names and the beginning of sentences AND THAT'S
IT.

Can't always get what we want...

>'Irregular' consonants.  These appear not to fit in the grid above.
>
><s~> = <s-tilde> = voiceless bidental fricative
><z~> = <z-tilde> = voiced bidental fricative
><m'>             = simultaneous bilablial nasal and glottal stop
><n'>             = simultaneous palatal nasal and glottal stop
><tlh>            = voiceless alveolar lateral affricate
><dlh>            = voiced alveolar lateral affricate
><klh>            = voiceless velar lateral affricate
><glh>            = voiced velar lateral affricate
The first two aren't bad, though I could've used t-tilde and l-tilde (really
a stroke through the letters, as in Hebrew transliteration).  The next two,
what are they, implosive nasals or creaky nasals?  The last four are
perfect.  (Except I just had "tl" to imply a voiceless lateral affricate,
rather than the more accurate "tlh" -- I really hate having to use
trigraphs.)

Some other conlanger(s) here had velar-lateral (or uvular-lateral?)
affricates, probably alongside alveolar-laterals.  To me they sound almost
identical, and I know of no natlang examples.  Tech doesn't have
velar-laterals, but one or more might pop up among local variants of <kl>
(two separate consonants, mind you), and they could even merge with <tl>
(one phoneme here).  Also, <kr> could become <t.r> (retroflex <t> plus <r>);
it happens in Tibetan incidentally.

Worse yet, Tech can have <tl> as one phoneme (alveolar-lateral affricate) or
<tl> as two (dental stop followed by lateral continuant), and theoretically,
both can begin a word!  This would be very difficult to distinguish without
some sort of divider -- a hyphen, a vertical bar, something.  It's just so
ugly to look at.

By the way, both <l> and <r> become voiceless before voiceless
stops/affricates (<lt> becomes <Lt> or <lht> for example), and glottalized
before ejectives.  But in local speech the latter might disappear especially
word-finally, so you could end up with completely new phonemes -- <l> <lh>
and <l'>, and <r> <rh> <r'>.  I might have to use Greek smooth
(apostrophe/"nine" single quote) and rough ("reversed/inverted 9" single
quote) breathing marks written above lambda and rho to clarify.

>Semivowels.  These can be syllabic.
>
><y'> = <y-acute> = velar approximant
><ly'>            = velar lateral approximant
><y>              = palatal approximant
><ly>             = palatal lateral approximant
><r>              = alveolar approximant
><l>              = alveolar lateral approximant
><w'> = <w-acute> = labio-palatal approximant
><w>              = labio-velar approximant
Velar approximant, that's similar to American English/Mandarin/Armenian
semivowel-like "r" right?  Technically, that's a "backed y" in Tech.  (No
pun intended.)

And yes, I have a palatized <w>, the initial of French _huit_ in that
by-gawd awful conlang.

Currently, I only have consonant phonology completed, and I'm working on
vocabulary now.  I'm trying to save up some money to buy the entire
Nostratic wordlist, except there are three different versions
(Ilich-Svitych, Bomhard and Dolgopolsky)!  I still haven't made a solid
decision on vowels; currently I have six, seven or eight vowel phonemes, but
that number, as I said before, could be reduced to two.  I hope not really;
I want a lot of vowels.  And I will have a lot after figuring out under what
circumstances I'll nasalize (like in Hindi, French and Portuguese) and
aspirate (well this one's kinda hard... either a vowel plus final _visarga_
/h./ in Sanskrit, or voiceless vowels as in Cheyenne and the high short
vowels of Japanese).  A lot of vowels will disappear (/i/ leaves
palatization and /u/ labiovelarization, when concerning preceding
consonants), so some rough consonant sequences may occur, along the lines of
Georgian (isn't there some word _mts'qrvi_ or something?) or Classical
Tibetan.

All I know about vowels for now: ä (a-umlaut) has two allophones, depending
on stress or open/closed syllables: [ae] (ligatured, the ash) and [@]
(schwa).  Also, ü (u-umlaut) likewise has two allophones: [y] (French u) and
[i-] (i-bar, Russian bI).  If there's an ö, then it would have two
allophones: [o/] (Danish o-slash) and [o-] (rounded schwa, similar to French
e).  The other two vowels I listed, [oe] (oe-ligature, low front rounded)
and [A] (a backed/rounded a similar to Danish å/a-ring, Hungarian short a or
Farsi long a), have unknown origins as of yet -- IF they exist.

Danny
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