Proto-Imperial

Phonemes

Consonants

The consonant system of Proto-Imperial is characterized by a large amount of plosives and affricates (here called stops), with 4 different manners of articulation: lenis, fortis, glottalized and prenasalized at 5 different points of articulation, as well as the glottal stop. On the other hand there are few fricatives, and no phonemic nasals.

		Bilabial	Alveolar			Alveolo- palatal	Velar	Uvular	Glottal
			plain	fricated	lateral
Stop	lenis	p	t	ʦ	tɬ	ʨ	k	q	ʔ
	fortis	pʰ	tʰ	ʦʰ	tɬʰ	ʨʰ	kʰ	qʰ
	glottalized	ɓ	tʼ	ʦʼ	tɬʼ	ʨʼ	kʼ	qʼ
	prenasalized	mb	nd	nʣ	ndɮ	ɲʥ	ŋg	ɴɢ
Fricative				s		ɕ			h
Approximant					l	(j)	(w)

The central approximants /w/ and /j/ can be treated as consonantal allophones of /u/ and /i/ respectively.

Vowels

Proto-Imperial has three contrastive vowel qualities /i, u, a/ at two different vowel heights (high, low). There are also two contrastive vowel lengths and a contrast in nasalization. There are also 4 diphthongs. This results in 12 phonemic vowels, shown below.

Oral, Long

	Front	Back
High	iː	uː
Low	aː

Oral, Short

	Front	Back
High	i	u
Low	a

Nasal, Long

	Front	Back
High	ĩː	ũː
Low	ãː

Nasal, Short

	Front	Back
High	ĩ	ũ
Low	ã

There are also 2 oral and 2 nasal diphthongs:

Diphthongs

	Oral	Nasal
Closing to ɪ	aɪ	ãɪ
Closing to ʊ	aʊ	ãʊ

Syllable structure and constraints

The syllable structure is C(G)V(X), where

C is any (phonemic) consonant (i.e. no central approximant)

G is one of the two central consonants, [j] or [w]

V is any vowel or diphthong

X is one of the two glottal consonants, /ʔ/ or /h/

The central approximants cannot occur before the vowel of which they are allophones. In other words [w] does never occur before /u(ː)/ and [j] does never occur before /i(ː)/. The palatal approximant [j] does not occur after sibilants or affricates. It also doesn't seem to occur after uvular consonants. The labio-velar approximant [w] does not occur after the lateral affricates.