Re: DECAL: Examples #2: Phonotactics

* Sai Emrys said on 2005-01-13 03:28:51 +0100
> Q1: What are your allowable syllable structures?
C: any consonant
V: any vowel, diphthong or long consonant

(C)(C)V(C)

If the C's are the same, that's equal to a long consonant. If there
should ever be C:+C: and the C's are the same, it's always two morae.

Generally, if the syllable does not have a coda and the vowel is short,
it's one mora. Otherwise it has two morae.

> Q2: Onset clusters?
(C)(C) where all must be of the same voicing, and there is
breathiness-harmony: if one is breathy, they're all breathy.

/h/ and /h\/ are never in clusters, and only show up as single onsets or
between vowels.

> Q3: Codas?
(C), but *not* unvoiced plosives, and voiced plosives are pronounced
breathy if it is the end of a word. Besides, the coda-consonant can be
long and still be part of the syllable, but unless the nucleus is a
short vowel, this means the syllable as a whole is super-heavy, with
three morae.

> Q4: Any changes depending on place in word, etc.?
See Q3. Long plosives that start a word get an ephenthetic vowel in
some dialects, so {kksan} -> {ikksan}

> Q5: Motivation / reasoning / goals behind this?
It evolved into this during the last ten years. It had triple-C
word-onsets once but clusters have generally been simplified. Not that
clusters are that necessary when you have 81 consonant phonemes :)


t.