New lang- Quienha

In a moment of boredom, I was flicking through the appendix to LOTR and read that
Tolkien tried to spell Quenya like Latin. We have conlangs which take Quenya
down the Celtic route, what about the Romance one. I applied some romance
sound-changes to Quenya (mainly to give a Portuguese flavour) and came up with
Quienha /kjen_j@/.

Phonology
Quienha has 22 consonants:
                            labials    dentals    palatals    velars
stops                    p, b        t, d                        k, g           
fricatives               f, v         s, z, S, Z
approximants        w                        j
laterals                                l            l_j
rhotics                                r
nasals                   m           n            n_j

Quienha uses the Latin alphabet, assigning the following values to the letters:
c        /s/ before i or e, /k/ otherwise
ch      /S/
h        is always silent, but see ch, lh and nh
j        /Z/
lh       /l_j/
nh      /n_j/
qu     only occurs before i or e, where it represents /k/
x        /S/
y        /j/
z        /z/, or /ts/

The other letters are pronounced much the same as in English.

Quienha's oral vowels are written so:
a is pronounced /a/ or /@/ at the end of a word.
e is pronounced /e/
è is pronounced /E/
i is pronounced /i/
o is pronounced /o/
ò is pronounced /O/
u is pronounced /y/
ou is pronounced /u/

The nasal vowels are pronounced:
am, an, ã are pronounced /a~/
em, en, are pronounced /E~/
om, on õ are pronounced /O~/
um, un are pronounced /i~/

The diphthongs are:
ai /aj/
au /aw/
ei /ej/
eu /ew/
ie /je/
ue /we/

Stress is regularly on the penult, when the stress is irregular it is indicated by an
acute accent (on è and ò it becomes ê and ô)

Now for the goodies, some words:

auchè - fame - Q. alcar
èja - hello - Q. aiya
amiés - name - Q. amilessë
ãè - sun - Q. anar
azo - father - Q. atto
ceriaquem - sailor - Q. ciryaquen
cueva - house - Q. coa
yeuda - elf - Q. elda
yelhem - star - Q. elen
echa - all - Q. ilqua.
licõa - candle - Q. lícuma
nheud - three - Q. nelde

Well, any thoughts so far? I'll post some grammar later.

----------------------------------
La plus belle fois qu'on m'a dit 
          "je t'aime"
                   c'était un mec
                             qui me l'a dit...
Francis Lalane
----------------------------------

Replies