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Re: DECAL: Examples #2: Phonotactics

From:Mike Ellis <nihilsum@...>
Date:Thursday, January 13, 2005, 23:59
Sai Emrys wrote:

>Same deal as last time. > >Q1: What are your allowable syllable structures? >Q2: Onset clusters? >Q3: Codas? >Q4: Any changes depending on place in word, etc.? >Q5: Motivation / reasoning / goals behind this?
For RHEAN - Q1: syllable structre is KVF - K is any single consonant, permissible onset cluster, or nothing - V is a vowel, either short or long - F is any single consonant (except /h/, /dZ/, /B/ or /4/*), permissible final cluster, dipthong-glide (/i/ or /u/)**, or nothing. * coda /r/ and /4/ are the same sound, pronounced [r] and written _r_. ** this explains why, for example, _k'au_ is one syllable [Xau] while _c'aur_ is two syllables [tSa"ur], or why _kai_ is one syllable and _haik_ is two. Q2: I still haven't figured this all out. Rhean clusters can be sadistic: [Gd], [pS], [gz], [zd], [mr], [xp], [gn], [fk] are among the strange onsets attested in the lexicon. There should eventually be a page on the Rhean site explaining the cluster rules. Right now I still haven't discovered what they are. Q3: Similar to the above, but codas seem more restricted than onsets (is it the other way around in English?). Nasal+stop and liquid+stop are common here, and final /z/ can follow pretty much anything (dvaarz, hebz), though it is [s] in cases like _rakz_ etc. Q4: it seems that in Rhean, coda is coda whether in the middle of a word or at the end of it. Medial clusters are unlimited (as far as I know) because any coda can be followed by any onset. In fast speech, these will often get run together and assimilate voice etc. 'Geminates' due to compounding/derivation are usually not pronounced geminate. Q5: Sometimes I look at some of this and have NO idea what I was thinking. The motivation would have been that I liked the sound of the word at the time. 'Reason'?... meh. For TOLBORESE - I still haven't worked out all of the phonotactics for this one. They're considerably more restricted than Rhean, but the rules are still tricky to discover. Q1: CV(F) - C is any single consonant (even /N/ occurs initially). Though the glottal stop is not phonemic, syllables that begin with 'no' consonant have an initial glottal stop. - V is a vowel. Each vowel is its own syllable and there are no diphthongs. - F is one of the consonants p t k l m n N r s S. While the unaspirated stops /p t k/ are usually written _b d g_, I write them _p t k_ in final position because they're always unvoiced there (and /p_h t_h k_h/ don't occur finally) Q2, Q3: None. Q4: Certain prefixes/particles cause the first consonant to be geminate ("hard join") or prenasalised ("soft join"); compounds can bring coda+onset together. But there are no true word initial or final clusters. Q5: Mostly to break away from what I'd done in Rhean. For OMURAX - Q1: KVF - K is a single consonant, cluster, or nothing - V is a vowel or a diphthong (and there's a lot of those: ai, au, ou, eu, ei, io, etc) - F is a single consonant, coda cluster (see below) or nothing. Q2: Onset clusters are pretty simple: any stop + liquid, /s/ + unvoiced stop, or /s/ + unvoiced stop + liquid. All of these plus a few more can occur in the middle of a word. Q3: The only coda clusters I can think of are [nt] and [ns]. There may be final [nks], which would be found in the ergative case of a word that ended in [nka] Q4: word boundaries are very important. The only consonants that occur in word-final position are /t n r l s f/. A few words were written with a final _d_ but it's believed the /d/ was pronounced [t] here. Final /f/ plus the ergative -s makes /ps/. Final /n/ and /t/ vanish before -s. Q5: See the Q5 above.
>Thanks, > > - Sai
M