Syllables and stoof

DAY TWO: Define possible syllable structure and phonetics.

The syllable structure itself, at least, I'm happy with - (C)V(V)(C) - so I'm keeping that. Onwards to my phoneme notes...

"add ‘^h’ between two vowels when the first one is a front vowel"
Right... I think this was an arbitrary decision and I have no idea where I was going with. Looking at it now, I am left wondering why the first vowel is the one that matters? Would it not make more sense to have a... breath-stop or whatever the heck that's supposed to be before a specific kind of vowel...?

Let's look at my vowels, first. I have six vowel sounds, which are all unique letters: ah, eh, ee, ih, oo, oh, loosely speaking, which I romanize as a e y i u o, respectively. The "front vowels" are e, i and y. Playing with the sounds aloud, I like the idea of having a "silent consonant" stuck in before front vowels, so I'll change 'first one' to 'second one'.

"add ‘ⁱ’ between two consonants when the second is a fricative"
Well now that I've identified these as 'silent consonant' and 'silent vowel' it's easier to understand what I'm doing here. Now the question is, why fricative, and do I like it?

The available fricatives are f, th, s, sh and h. There are... a lot of fricatives, considering I only have fifteen consonants. I mean, I did that on purpose, but I'd forgotten. >.> That makes having a special pronunciation case for fricatives seem like a poor idea. On the other hand, going from, say, a stop to a fricative doesn't sound the way I want, so maybe I will keep this one. I'll give it a test run when doing vocab construction.

fricatives can’t be next to other fricatives or affricates
Geez, self, way to prevent yourself from putting half your consonants next to each other. >.> I'm going to keep this, though.

no alveolar + (velar, alveolar-palatal, or glottal)
.Okay, my alveolar column has s, ts, r, and l. Velar has k and kh, alv-pal has sh, glottal has h. This seems reasonable enough, no reason not to leave it.

r can't go before a consonant
Sure, why not!

This leads me to "what if word construction/etymology breaks a pronunciation rule?" which leads to SOUND CHANGES.

I shall do sound changes tomorrow.

from RP logs

( Read more... )

Following

It was an entire week before Corentin finally said something.

"You know," he said in a low voice as they stopped for lunch, "there's some--"

"Yes." Sigruko cut him off before he could finish the sentence. "I noticed."

Corentin sighed. "I know you did."

Sigruko had known Corentin for years now - decades, really - and that tone in particular was one she knew very well. (Better than she would've liked.) Holding back an echoing sigh of her own, she looked over at him. "All right, what is it then?"

"Are you really going to just let him trail after you like this?" Neither of them looked back; the boy following them was good enough that they wouldn't see anything, and they knew it. "It's dangerous."

"I'm sure he knows that." Sigruko looked thoughtfully at her friend. "What are you thinking, Cory?"

"Well." He hesitated, now that she'd forced him into the topic, like he usually did. "I was thinking, if we can't convince him to go home--"

"Unlikely." The corner of her mouth twitched up into a smile. "He's stuck with us this far."

"Yeah. And trying to lose him is too dangerous, so why not let him join us?"

Sigruko raised an eyebrow. "Because that's not dangerous at all."

"It's less dangerous than trying to follow us through the wilds alone," Corentin pointed out, a little acerbically. "At least that way we could keep him from getting killed. Maybe even teach him something."

Sigruko blinked in surprise. "You mean take him as an apprentice? ...a Student?"

"Well... something like that."

Sigruko thoughtfully pulled out a piece of bread and chewed on it. Her father had taken up being a Mentor; she could certainly handle having one Student. Or student, if the boy wasn't Ellehemaei after all.

It was an interesting idea.