Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

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Shemtov
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by Shemtov »

Mos, an isolate spoken in North Iran. Based on the name, folk belief is that al-Khiḍr was from their ancestors, and the name was given to them by interaction with the Banu Israil, given al-Khiḍr's association with Musa:
/p b ɓ t d ɗ t͡ʃ d͡ʒ k g q/
/m n/
/ θ ð s z ʃ ʒ x ɣ h/
/r/
/l j ʋ/

/i u e o a/

Arabic writing (reversed):
​​​​​<پ ب بّ ت د دّ چ ج ک گ ق>
<م ن>
<ث ذ س ز ش ژ ح ع ه>
<ر>
<ل ی وْ>

<ي و اِ اُ ا>
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by DV82LECM »

"Mos" in Crona means BAD. But this is GOOD.
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Porphyrogenitos
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by Porphyrogenitos »

So, a concept based on some things I learned about in some recent classes. A while ago I read about tone sandhi, and how in many Sinitic tone sandhi systems, you'll have a thing where every syllable in a syntactic phrase takes the sandhi-tone except for the last, and how each tone essentially has one sandhi form that it switches to when in a sandhi position.

The other day a professor of mine was talking about French stress and how it's phrase-level, with no stress at all except the last syllable in a phrase. And that got me thinking, combine that with a vowel reduction system, and that's almost like a stress-based vowel sandhi system: Every vowel in a phrase takes its reduced form except the last, which bears stress.

So I thought about applying that with this vowel reduction system I thought of a while ago: (S- strong/stressed, W - weak/unstressed/reduced)

Code: Select all

S  W

i  i
e  i
a  ə
o  u
u  u
ə  ə
aj e
aw o
So if you had a noun phrase made up of some words like /kaprau̯me do osimula/ it would look like: [kəpromidusimuˈlaː] (with likely contraction of the do and lengthening of the stressed vowel).

Now, that's where the sensible part of the idea ends.

I also had a very silly idea recently of making a languages whose lexicon consisted of just 80-120 CV monosyllables and nothing more. Not an oligosynthetic conlang - there would be homophones, and I would just force the language to deal with it. Oh, and no concatenating morphology. Maybe some genitive phrases like 'X of Y' to reduce ambiguity (proto-compounds, essentially, not yet lexicalized).

Then I thought, oh, what if I combined this with the vowel-reduction sandhi idea? Then I could have whole sentences consisting of nothing but stuff like /ki po ta vai̯ nu lo na nau̯ sa ne/ which gets broken up into maybe two syntactic phrases like: [kiˈpoː | təvenulunənoˈsaː | ˈneː ‖] (no idea what the actual syntactic structure would be there)

But then I remembered this would necessarily be very syntax-heavy, and that I hate syntax (well, kind of). So to at least take some of the burden off of the syntax, I would want some apophonic inflectional morphology. The vowels aren't a very good choice, since a bunch of the contrasts get erased in non-final position. So it must be the consonants. But that would decrease the number of distinct lexical items if I have to dedicate some consonant contrasts to apophonic inflection. So basically I can either abandon the strict CV template, or use a fairly large consonant inventory to ensure I have plenty of possible contrasts for both inflection and the lexicon. This would also detract from the goal of only having 80-120 possible syllables.

I don't really want to use tone, since the whole idea of the vowel sandhi thing was to do a tone thing without tone, but maybe perhaps a prominent lexical category, like person/number on verbs, could bear a floating tone that migrates to the stressed final syllable of the verb phrase. Or is distributed across the verb phrase. If there is a verb phrase? Not all languages have verb phrases. So I don't know. I also thought about maybe introducing phonemic gemination, but I almost feel that would ruin the rapid-fire mumbly rhythm of the language (as I imagine it).

Any other ideas for this crazy scheme are welcome.
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by Frislander »

/p t t͡s k/
/s h/
/m n ŋ/
/w j/

/i iː o oː/
/eː a aː/

Word-internal consonant clusters are restricted to /s h/ + /p t k/, while word-final consonants are restricted to /k ŋ w/, where /w/ only appears as part of the diphthongs /iw aw/.
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by Frislander »

/p t k/
/h/
/m n ŋ/
/w/

/i u/
/e o/
/a/
/iu ui eo oe/
/ai au/

Syllable structure is (C)V(K), where onsetless syllables are only found word-initially and K is restricted to word-final /k ŋ/.
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CarsonDaConlanger
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by CarsonDaConlanger »

/m n/
/p t d ts tɬ k ʔ/
/ɓ ɗ k'/
/s ɬ x/
/l j w/

/i u/
/e o/
/æ ɑ/

+vowel length

CV(V/R)
R=l,n,m

How realistic do you think this is?
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sangi39
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by sangi39 »

CarsonDaConlanger wrote: 10 Apr 2019 23:24 /m n/
/p t d ts tɬ k ʔ/
/ɓ ɗ k'/
/s ɬ x/
/l j w/

/i u/
/e o/
/æ ɑ/

+vowel length

CV(V/R)
R=l,n,m

How realistic do you think this is?
I really like the /ɓ ɗ kʼ/ which made me think of Proto-Mayan to begin with (which has /ɓ tʼ kʼ/ and so on, and the singular voiced /d/ reminds me of Finnish.

The only thing that's giving me some pause for thought is having /ts tɬ/, /s ɬ/, ejectives, but no /tsʼ tɬʼ/. I can't think of a language off the top of my head that has that sort of gap (where a language lacks /tsʼ tɬʼ/ it tends to lack ejectives entirely, IIRC). I'm sure someone can point out a counterexample, but from what I can tell, affricates tend to pattern as plosives, so they tend to make the same distinctions, e.g. if plosives can be voiced, affricates also tend to have voiceless vs. voiced pairs, if there are ejectives, affricates also tend to have ejective counterparts, and so on.
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by cedh »

I agree with sangi39 that the lack of /tsʼ tɬʼ/ is fairly unusual in such an inventory, but given your relatively simple syllable structure, this lack is easy to explain with diachronics: Suppose an earlier stage of the language had no glottalized consonants, with only /p t k ʔ/ as voiceless stops, but allowing them in coda position. Then the following sound changes occurred (among others, presumably):

{ps ts ks} {pɬ tɬ kɬ} > ts tɬ
p t k > ʔ / _C, _#
ʔ > zero / _CC (this eliminates any ʔts ʔtɬ clusters; alternatively the outcome could be a preceding long vowel)
ʔp ʔt ʔk > pʼ tʼ kʼ
Vʔ > Vː / except _V
pʼ tʼ > ɓ ɗ

and voilà, you get basically the described phonological distribution.
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by Frislander »

I think the only place I've seen a language with both ejectives and affricates but no ejective affricates is actually Na‘vi, a conlang. If anything the tendency is the other way round - languages with both ejectives and affricates tend to be more likely to have only ejective affricates than non-ejective ones (see the Salishan family, which universally has /t͡ɬ’/ but almost as universally lacks its non-ejective counterpart), as well as many others such as Sandawe in Africa.
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by CarsonDaConlanger »

I've removed /ts/ entirely, and I've got diachronics where older /tɬʼ kxʼ/ > /tʼ kʼ/ > /kʼ kʼ/
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by Porphyrogenitos »

/m n ɲ ŋ/
/p t c k ʔ/

/a i u/

Syllable structure is (C)V(C). Nasals assimilate in place to a following consonant, non-nasals assimilate totally to a following consonant. Stops are voiced after nasals, and non-glottal stops are lenited and possibly voiced between stops, maybe something like [ɸ θ ç x] or [β̞ ð̞ j ɰ]. Word-final stops are likely unreleased.

Practically speaking, this means the following segments are contrastive intervocalically:
[m n ɲ ŋ]
[mb nd ɲɟ ŋg]
[pp tt cc kk]
[ɸ θ ç x]

Gemination may also be possibly phonemic, or conditioned at a fairly deep level, due to stress-related phenomena.

There is a process of rightward frontness harmony: After a syllable with /i/, all instances of /u/ become /i/. (The reverse is not the case - in this way, /i/ is "dominant" and /u/ is "recessive".)

There may be remnants of a historical voiced/lenis series - I'm thinking that perhaps a series /b d (ɟ) g/ went to zero postvocalically and merged with the voiceless series word-initially and in geminates, with the distinction only resurfacing in patterns of sandhi or morphological gradation.

The palatal series may be secondary in origin, reflected in synchronic patterns of palatalization. /ŋ/ may also be only recently phonemic from /ng/ clusters; /ʔ/ may also be recently phonemic from lexicalized sandhi effects in compounds or morphology.
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by Zekoslav »

It's not quite a phonology idea, but I've come up with the idea of a descendant of Koine Greek (spoken somewhere in the Middle East) where φ, θ and χ didn't become fricatives.

Instead, there would be a chain shift where π, τ, κ > /b/, /d/, /g/ and φ, θ, χ > /p/, /t/, /k/. A little bit later, β and γ would devoice word-initially becoming [f] and [x] while remaining [v] and [ɣ] word-internally. This is simply a continuation of tendencies already present in Koine Greek (apparently the voiced stops became fricatives earlier than the voiceless aspirated ones, and there was positional voicing of voiceless stops) and would result in some serious obstructions to mutual intelligibility (the mismatch between consonants would be like that between Ancient Greek and Ancient Macedonian), especially if there was some serious vowel reduction as well!
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by Creyeditor »

I really like that idea. Did you already think of other changes? Maybe one could do something nice with the vowels (keeping half of them from becoming /i/)?
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by Zekoslav »

Creyeditor wrote: 22 Apr 2019 21:42 I really like that idea. Did you already think of other changes? Maybe one could do something nice with the vowels (keeping half of them from becoming /i/)?
During the relevant period, only ει and ηι had merged with ι, so you can definitely avoid rampant iotacism. It's likely too late to preserve vowel length, though: the language had stress accent and incipient vowel reduction. With the initial inventory of /i y e ε a o u/ that could lead to some interesting developments (maybe even some sort of consonant mutation, given that final /n/ would likely be lost as in IRL Greek).

The only particular change I've come up with is related to the change /u/ > /v/ when in diphthongs. In IRL Greek it eventually devoiced to /f/ in front of voiceless consonants. In this language it would be the opposite (maybe even the trigger for the general voicing of voiceless stops), so that e.g. αὐτός would become /avˈdos/ (and, after vowel reduction, who knows what...)
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by Frislander »

/p t kʷ q (qʷ)/
/p’ t’ t͡ɬ’ t͡ʃ’ kʷ’ ʔ (ʔʷ)/
/s ɬ ʃ xʷ ʜ (ʜʷ) h/
/m n j w/

/i ə~u/
/ɛ a/

The /ə~u/ contrast on the surface is restricted to appearing before uvulars a /q ʔ ʜ/, or alternatively you could interpret this as a labialisation contrast which is otherwise not seen on these consonants, as evidenced by the presence of /u/ before /kʷ kʷ’ xʷ w/ in the same manner. Similarly there is a collapse of the /i ə/ and /ɛ a/ contrasts before palatals, with the front vowels only being found in those contexts.

Syllable structure is CV(C)(C), where any single consonant can appear in the coda, while clusters are restricted to /s ɬ ʃ xʷ ʜ (ʜʷ) m n/ plus a stop, and /p t ʃ kʷ q (qʷ)/ + /s ɬ ʃ xʷ ʜ (ʜʷ)/. These are the only clusters permitted - the morphology is structured to prevent other clusters from arising.
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by LinguoFranco »

/m n ɲ/
/p t c k ʔ/
/mb ⁿd ŋɟ ŋg/
/s z f h/
/l ʎ r/
/j w/
/t͡ɕ d͡ʑ/

/i iː u uː/
/ɛ eː ɔ oː/
/a aː/

/mb ⁿd ŋɟ ŋg/ are supposed to be prenasalized consononats, but the IPA Keyboard only has /ⁿ/. I don't have much for phonotactics yet, although it is looking somewhat similar to my main project, with length distinction on vowels, and will likely be mora-timed. However, I think this language will have palatalization, so /ⁿdʲ/ would become /ⁿd͡ʑ/, for example.
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by DesEsseintes »

Here you go:

ᵐb ⁿd ᶯɖ ᶮɟ ᵑɡ
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by Frislander »

/p~ɸ t~θ k~x q~χ ʔ/
/pː tː tːs kː/
/b~v d~ð g~ɣ/
/m n ŋ/
/mː nː ŋː/
/w ɾ j/

The fricatives are found between vowels. Syllable structure is CV(C), where coda Cs are only found word-finally, but any consonant can come finally except the glides or the flap.

/i ə u/
/a/
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by CivilixXXX »

What do you think about this phonology? Is it realistic?
/p t k q ʔ/
/p’ t’ k’ q’/ (ejectives)
/b d ɡ ɢ/
/m n ŋ ɴ/
/f v θ ð s z ʃ ʒ x ɣ ħ ʕ h/
/ʍ ʝ ɬ r̥/
/w j l r/

/ɑ i u/
/ə̆ ɪ̆ ʊ̆/
/aː iː uː/
/tsʲi¹⁴vʲiː⁵³ʎiks³³ iksʔiksʔiks/
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Re: Random phonology/phonemic inventory thread

Post by Zekoslav »

I've read many times that /ɢ/ and /ɴ/ are rare, but otherwise I don't see anything unusual. It's very "regular" in that there's not many gaps in the inventory - nearly everything fits into a place x manner x phonation grid.
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