Re: tlhn'ks't, ngghlyam'ft, and other scary words

D: "Christophe Grandsire" <christophe.grandsire@...>

| Just counted, and Maggel has at least 60 consonants (I counted palatalised
| consonants in it, because not all consonants can be palatalised, but I didn't
| count tension and gemination, which are phonemic but can apply to any
| consonant. So you can directly multiply the figure by 4 ;))) ). And the funny
| part is: Maggel doesn't have to resort to ejective, emphatic or whatever
| strange consonants for it (not even clicks). Only with pulmonic consonants it
| manages to get to that figure! :))

Tech has a high number of consonants, but I don't know exactly how many. It all
depends on what I end up using when I get all the words made up. I'm guessing
around 100 for the standard language which is based on Classical Tech. Old Tech,
the proto-language spoken circa 10,000 BCE, had only 40-50 consonants.

The stops/affricates are of the triad voiceless/voiced/ejective. Lenition and
nasalization (like Irish!) increase the number, as do palatization and
labiovelarization ("soft" and "hard"). Lenition of p/b/p` produces f/v/b`; the
last one is a voiced implosive. Nasalization makes mh/m/mb` (the first one is a
voiceless, aspirated nasal and the last is a prenasalized voiced implosive).

As for vowels, Old Tech had six, the predictable <a @ e i o u>. Long/short/zero
gradation, fronting and backing umlaut, nasalization and possibly
pharyngealization pad the number quite a bit.

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