Re: Telona phonetics

In a message dated 1/29/02 5:50:10 PM, jonathan_knibb@HOTMAIL.COM writes:

>Right, here we go.
>
>Consonants.
>Orthographically (each of these is a phoneme):
>Unvoiced stops: bilabial 'p', dental 't', palatal 'c', velar 'k'
>Voiced stops: just bilabial 'b' and dental 'd'
>Unvoiced fricatives: bilabial 'f', alveolar 's', palatal 'h', velar 'ch'
>Nasals: bilabial 'm', dental 'n'
>Alveolar flap 'r'
>Alveolar lateral 'l'
>Velar approximant 'w'
>
>Excuse my lack of X-SAMPA experience, but AFAICT, in the same order as
>above:
>[p t c k]  [b d]  [f\ s C x]  [m n]  [4]  [l]  [M\]
>
>The unvoiced stops are unaspirated; dentals are post-dental; palatals are
>pure palatal with no alveolar co-articulation.
>Fricatives may be voiced intervocalically, especially /f/ and /s/.
>Yes, /f/ is bilabial, not labiodental.  Also, /s/ is much less grooved
>than
>most, and can even be realised as an very weakly sibilant, ungrooved, lax
>apico-alveolar fricative (is there a symbol for this in IPA, never mind
>in
>X-SAMPA??).
Hmm. Well non-sibilant alveolar fricatives (which I love) are mentioned in
_Sounds of the World's Languages_ by Ladefoged and Maddieson, and transcribed
/T_-/ and /D_-/, that is theta and ummmm.... that other one, whatever it's
called (eth?) with a short vertical line underneath. It says in Icelandic,
the voiceless one is laminal and the voiced one is usually apical. I don't
know if it's legal to put 2 diacritics under one letter, but if so you could
do that and specify that its apical with the apical sign /_a/. Or you could
just mention that in a note somewhere, along with the sound's slightly
sibilant character.

>The velar approximant (my favourite!) is accompanied by lip tensing and
>partial closure in the spread position, not lip-rounding as such (same
>lip
>position as in Swedish long 'y').  It has an alternative realisation, as
>a
>labialised velar lateral.  <gulp>
>
>Vowels.
>There are six vowel phonemes, each of which has a long and a short
>allophone.
>/e:/ = [e]
>/e/ = [E]
>/a:/ = [a]
>/a/ = [A], roughly; maybe a little raised and centralised from [A]
>/i:/ = [i]
>/i/ = somewhere between [I] and [1]  (small capital i and i-bar)
>/o:/ = [o]
>/o/ = [O] - again, centralised in rapid speech
>/y:/ = [y]
>/y/ = [@\], close-mid central unrounded  (I'm thinking of letting /y/ be
>omitted in certain contexts)
>/u:/ = [u]
>/u/ = somewhere between [U] and [}]  (small capital u and u-bar)
>
>In the citation form, the first syllable of a word carries a long vowel,
>and
>all subsequent vowels are short.
>Syllables are strictly (C)V in the citation form, although affixes and
>clitics can cause words to end with a consonant.  There are three further
>phonotactic constraints:
>(1)  No two consecutive non-initial syllables may carry the same consonant
>-
>this includes the zero consonant, which means that sequences of three
>adjacent vowels are forbidden.
>(2)  Apart from monosyllables, no word may end with a high vowel (y or
>u).
>(3)  Vowel harmony.  The 'front' vowels are /e i y/ and the 'back' vowels
>are /a o u/; all but the first vowel in a word must come from the same
>group
>(the first vowel may or may not harmonise).
>
>A few nonsense words for illustration:
>'citano'  /ci:tano/  [ci:tAnO]
>'hechi'  /Ce:xi/  [Ce:xI]
>'tomelyfi'  /to:melyfi/  [to:mEl@\f\I]  (or perhaps, if I decide to:
>[to:mElf\I] )
>and ... 'Telona'  /te:lona/  [te:lOnA]
>
>How's that for a start?  Phonology later in the week if you wish!
Looks great so far! I'm certainly having fun trying to pronounce all those
vowels in between other vowels. We never went over central vowels or anything
in phonetics class, and that's a shame. And a labialized velar approximant
... I never even thought of that. I'm guessing the stress is usually on the
first syllable, or can it be other places?

>Jonathan.
Josh Roth
http://members.aol.com/fuscian/eloshtan.html