Round Robin Conlang/Observations

Thought I'd look at what our phonology looks like so far. --Trɔpʏliʊm • blah

Basic inventory

Consonants

		Labial	Coronal		Velar	Uvular	Glottal
Stops / affricates	Ejective			tsʹ	kʹ
	Voiceless	p	t	ts	k	q
	Voiced	b			ɡ
Nasals		m	n
Fricatives	Voiceless	f	s			χ	h
	Voiced	v
Liquid			l

Semivowel (?) /j/

Vowels /i e ɛ a ɔ o u/; /oi/; possibly /ai/ (seriously now, is "they two" [tsoi] or [tsai] ?) For purposes of vowel-harmonic suffixes, /a/ (phonetically open central [ä]?) counts as a back vowel.

Tone High and low. Low is unmarked.

Lenition

The following changes are attested:

Original	p	b	t	n	g	q
Lenited	f	v	s	ð̃	ɣ	χ

[ð̃ ɣ] have only been attested under spirant lenition thus far.

I would presume the process to apply regularly also to the "missing" buccal stops / nasals, ie. m, k → ṽ, x. Whether the other consonants do anything remains to be seen.

Other alternations

Gemination appears to be regular for at least lenitable consonants, with bb, tt, nn, gg attested. /tsʹ/ appears to resist gemination as seen from betsʼaq.

There is also prenasalization (apparently identical with gemination for nasals).

Syllable structure

Thus far (C)V(N)(C) seems sufficient (maximal example: boimb). Only clusters of two consonants have been observed medially, even them limited to geminates and nasal + consonant.

Root structure

Consonants appearing in verbal roots might be drawn from a more restricted set than all consonants. No voiceless fricatives or /ts/ or /l/ appear in any of the attested verb roots (though /l/ is present in the sole unanalysed noun we have). AlexFink