more on Doh (Orcish)

The name Doh for my nation of orcs doomed to tame the Antarctic Peninsula is
a tentative one.  The pronunciation is definitely [t'O], with a high tone
resulting from a final aspirate consonant.  Tonality is still in the early
stage of development, but I'm basically using Hmong (in both Pollard and
Pahawh scripts) and Vietnamese as models.

There are ten "normal" vowels: short and long each of /a e i o u/.  Short
values are /A E I O U/ and long values are /a e i o u/.  Four "special"
vowels are used, but they do not distinguish length.  They are /ae/ ligature
(the schwa), /oe/ ligature (mid front rounded; also written o-slash as in
Danish), /y/ (front high rounded) and /w/ (high central unrounded).  (<w>
and <y> are *never* used as consonants; use <j> and <v> instead.)

The consonants I'm just now working on, but there should be voiceless/voiced
each (or voiceless aspirated/voiceless glottalized) of: bilabial, dental,
alveolar sibilant, retroflex, palatal and velar -- in other words, the same
array as Mandarin), and I'll probably throw in uvular and lateral for good
measure.  Only voiceless fricatives will be found, with the exception of /v/
and /g^/ (Turkish g-breve), which are more like semivowels in fact.  There
will be nasals as well, along with the sonorants /l/ /r/ (and the
aforementioned /v/ and /j/).  /r/, however, is not an alveolar trill, but a
retroflex approximant, as in English.

My next post, which probably won't be until Monday, will discuss all these
matters further.

(By the way, a treaty between the United States and the United Kingdom later
later this new century allocated the peninsular and milder coastal regions
of the frozen continent as a prison colony, much to the chagrin of
environmentalists and scientists who had seen Antarctica as a sacred virgin
land not to be exploited by any kind of imperialism, but for the good of all
the earth.  Too bad such politically correct views are sorely frowned upon
by the New Republic (again that's a futuristic United States that feels it
has God-given rule the entire Western Hemisphere...)

Danny
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