Tíngrjsil etabnammity

Well, I've finally got the sound changes for Tíngrsil, also known as
Tzingrizhil, down, and now I'm working on the orthography. The system I've
got going is inspired by the Slavic langs and is mildly, though not
extremely, etabnamminous (and I hope I'm spelling that correctly). Any
comments are appreciated, of course.

The consonants come in two sets, palatalized and unpalatalized (a la
Slavic or Irish Gaelic), though some sound shifts have made the palatal
label convenient rather than descriptive. Here's a quick rundown:

Non-palatalized Palatalized
------------------------------
p   t   k       p'  ts,tS  tC
b   d   g       b'  dz     dj\
f   s   x       f'  S      C
v   z           v'  Z
m   n           m'  J
    l               K\
    r               z`

The vowels are seven:
----------------
 i    1    u
 e    @    o
      a

Here's where the fun comes in. Palatalization is indicated by the vowels,
not the consonants. The vowels /i e/ always provoke palatalization, and
the vowels /@ 1/ sometimes do. The vowels /u o a/ never palatalize (except
sometimes).

In the orthography, we write the full vowels /i e u o/ as |í é ú ó|. The
unaccented versions are used for the central vowels: |e| for /@/ when the
preceding consonant is palatalized, otherwise |o|, and |i| for [1] when
the preceding consonant is palatalized, otherwise |u|. Thus, we get the
following syllables:

ki   ke   ku   ko   ka   kí   ké   kó   kú
tC1  tC@  k1   k@   ka   tCi  tCe  ko   ku

To force palatalization before /a o u/, we write |j| after the vowel, so
|kjú| is [tCu].

There are some front vowels that don't palatalize, though, and for those
we put an |a| between the consonant and the vowel. This only happens
before /e/ and /i/, so we omit the accents in these cases. Thus, we also
can get |kae| for [ke] and |kai| for [ki]. I'm thinking of removing this,
though, and making people guess whether the vowels are palatalizing or
not. Secretly, this also happens with central vowels, but in that case it
shows up as an irregular alternation of the final vowel, e.g. "solzu"
[s@lz1] with dative infix -ós- becomes "solzósi" [s@lzoS1].

Lastly, we sometimes write |c| for [ts] (instead of t + front vowel or
|tj|). When the letter |c| is palatalized, the result is [tS]. E.g:
"vaeci" [vetS1], dative "vaecósi" [vetsoS1].

The system as I currently have it isn't too bad, but I'm open to
suggestions for making it worse :).

--
Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/
http://students.washington.edu/jaspax/blog

Jesus asked them, "Who do you say that I am?"

And they answered, "You are the eschatological manifestation of the ground
of our being, the kerygma in which we find the ultimate meaning of our
interpersonal relationship."

And Jesus said, "What?"

Reply