Re: New Language

En réponse à Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>:

>
> Vowel harmony: All vowels must be either front or back (recent loan
>    words might violate this), for this reason, {ay} only needs to be
>    written in words containing only low vowels
> S/X and Z/J: Originally, s and x were allophones, as were z and j.  X
>    and J occured before front vowels, S and Z before back vowels.
>    That's still true in native words, and is active in inflectional
>    morphology, but loan words have caused occurences of s and z before
>    front vowels, and x and j before back ones.
>
This looks like my language Tj'a-ts'a~n, which has also vowel harmony and the
same phonemic set as Kinikte (though as the harmony is front unrounded against
back rounded, the back 'a' is realized [Q]). Tj'a-ts'a~n has also a single
fricative phoneme /s/ realized [s], [S], [z] or [Z] depending on its surrounding
(for voice it assimilates with the neighbouring consonnant, when there's one,
for backness it assimilates with the neighbouring vowel). This is very
productive for prefixes and suffixes, though there is also consonnant harmony
which Kinikte lacks, which is based on a three-level scale:
voiceless/voiced/nasalized.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr