You know, I really am not a huge fan of phonology.  It is not on my list of Good Stuff.  (This is slowly changing)  However, a good conlague starts with a phonology:  without sounds, words cannot exist, at least not words that can be spoken.                                                                             

This is a good time to mention that Nrit is what's known as an "artlang", that is, it exists basically for my pleasure.  It's sort of a game I play, and being a game, it doesn't always make sense.

Please view in UTF-8 encoding to see the special characters properly.            

Phoneme Inventory:

Nrit's got a fairly complex vowel system: there are five vowels, i e a o u, which can be long, nasal, or both.
Long vowels are written with a circumflex: î ê â ô û.
Nasal vowels are written with a grave accent: ì è à ò ù.
   Long nasals are written as doubled nasals: ìì èè àà òò ùù.

There are a good load of consonants too:
They're enjoying being rather silly and asymmetrical, it seems.  Check it out: (note that this chart is not identical to the standard IPA consonant chart; I've collapsed some columns and rows together, and rearranged the rows, but you should survive it.)  Voiced consonants always appear first, then aspirates and voiced versions and voiced aspirates.  If any in a group are missing, aspirates go first, and voiced before unvoiced.  That third series is retroflexed, and where Nrit orthography differs radically from common ASCIIIPA I've provided IPA in the traditional slashes.
 

p   b t    th/T/    d   dh/D/ ṭ    ḍ k    q/k^h/    g    gh /g^h/
f    v s    x/S/    z   zh/Z/ ṣ    ẓ h    ḥ**

ts   c/tS/   ch/tS^h/   dz   j/dZ/ ṭṣ    ḍẓ
m n
w
l

r


rr*

*: This is trilled r, which only appears in the place of double r, which singly is a tap.
**: Speculation has it that this is becoming a voiced glottal fricative rather than a velar glide.                                                                                                        

Syllable structure is (C)(S)V(S)(C).  At times, words may start with a complex cluster that isn't technically allowed.

C = Any consonant.
S = Fricatives, nasals, aspirates, and liquids.
V = Any vowel.

There is voicing harmony in adjacent consonants, where nasals and liquids  are voicing-neutral. 

Aspirates can only follow homorganic stops or vowels, e.g.  tchar is a valid syllable, but tqar is not.  A nasal vowel can only appear if it's adjacent to a nasal or a liquid.

Nasal vowels can only appear adjacent to a nasal or liquid, or in the case of inflectional affixes, where a nasal consonant spread its nasality to vowels and was lost.  A few monosyllables break this rule; forgive them.

In diphthongs, /i/ and /u/ turn into the glides /j/ and /w/, unless they're marked with a trema, as so: ïa, àü.  Note that in the second case, the u is nasal as well, but the nasality is unmarked.  There are no diphthongs where nasality differs.  A combination like àu or eì, therefore, signals a syllable boundary.  On the other hand, part-nasal long vowels such as ìi and eè do exist.

                
  Compounding Rules:                                                                              

Again I remind you that Nrit is an artlang.

Anyway, compounding (I'd call it sandhi, but as I know it, sandhi happens between word boundaries, rather than between words) works rather oddly in Nrit.  It's not at all user-friendly.

Voicing Harmony:  Adjacent consonants usually want to be voicing-harmonized with their neighbours.  As I stated above, liquids and nasals are immune, and indeed they halt the progression of harmony.  Voicing harmony moves   from the right to the left.  If a stop gets doubled and it has an aspirated equivalent, the second stop becomes aspirated.    

Example:  If one were to be talking about the muddy water, one could say "sììr razadak", "the water muddy", or one could make razad (muddy) into a prefix, in which case you would say "razadsììr" (Razad has a suffix -ak that tells us it's an adjective, and some other things too, but that belongs on another page).  But that violates the voicing rule, so the d in razad becomes a t to match sììr's voiceless s, in which case you would get razatsììr, muddy-water.

Ephenthesis:  Nrit doesn't like it when stops of different positions collide.  That's a no-no.  So it introduces an ephenthetic fricative of the same position as the more central stop.  (That is, alveolar is preferred to all other positions, and retroflex is preferred to velar.  You can think of this as the appropriate stop becoming an affricative, if you like.  In fact, prefer this  interpretation.  It's better.)

Example:  You might at some point have to talk about "karak ṣoratak", the blue bird.  Now in reality you won't, because ṣorat is not a normal colour for birds to be - it's the priceless, unprintable ultramarine of ground lapis.  You see it occasionally in very old paintings.  At any rate, you may be feeling lazy and want to prefix ṣorat.  So you'd go and try to say "ṣoratkarak", but no!  Nrit says you can't do that!  You would insert the appropriate fricative, which here would be s, giving us "ṣoratskarak", which apparently is much more pronounceable to Nrit speakers.  Go figure.

bulletDissimilation:    If two adjacent syllables are identical, the coda of the first syllable  loses its stop identity and becomes a fricative.  The alveolar stops  become /T/ and /D/, rather than the usual /s/ and /z/. The nasal /n./ becomes /n/.

Example:  So, if you were going to talk about, say, the Pii Gazette, you'd want to say Tlainu (lake, mirror, newspaper) of Pîsirat (the land of Pii).  So, you'd add the genitive ending -atse to Pîsirat, which gives you the not-okay form Pîsiratatse.  So, the first /t/ becomes /T/, resulting in the phrase Tlainu Pîsirathatse.

bulletRising Vowels:   When a consonant is doubled after /e/, /o/, or their variants, they are raised to /i/ and /u/, respectively.  This rule doesn't apply to /r/ or /h/, which become completely different phonemes when doubled, rather than being geminated.

Example:  You want to find the fluid stem of the verb hansel (to sneak).  You know it's a group 4 verb, so its fluid form is of the form stable+Ca.  Now, you might be decieved into thinking that the fluid form must therefore be hansella, but that is not the case.  Dur to the Rising Vowel Law, it becomes hansilla.

Vowel Assimilation:  Vowels take on each other's qualities from left to right, disturbingly enough.  If two plain vowels collide, the second is dropped and the first becomes long.  If either is a nasal, the result is the first vowel, nasalized.  If there is a combination of length and nasality, then the result is the first vowel, both long and nasalized.

Example:  If you were noticing that someone had lovely green eyes, you might tell her that she has lovely "onùn dârak", or you might want to be lazy and prefix dâra (green) to onùn (eyes), in which case you'd want to say "dâraonùn", but that violates the rules!  Oh no!  So, the vowel assimilation rule tells us that the o would drop out and the a lengthen, resulting in "dârânùn".  Now, I wouldn't suggest actually doing thus, as oun (plural onùn) is a very short word, and you wouldn't want to be mistook for having said something dirty.

bulletNasal Elision:   Between two identical short non-nasal vowels, neither of which is part of a diphthong, a nasal will nasalize the heavier vowel and drop out, creating a part-nasal long vowel.  (The heavier vowel is the one having more consonants in its syllable.  If both vowels are equally light, nasalize the first.)

Example:  If you were to say "The frog jumped behind the tree", you'd want to say "halan marunnu bir arrutissak".  But since Nrit likes to incorporate subjects where it can, you want to prefix halan (frog) to arrutissak (jumped).  So you'd say "marunnu bir halanarrutissak".   Some helpful Nrit speaker might mention there that you forgot the Nasal Elision  Rule, and what you meant to say was "marunnu bir halàarrutissak".   (Now in reality this won't happen.  The observation has been made repeatedly  that most people don't understand the grammars of their own languages, or  their phonology rules.  In explanation of the seemingly wrong-placed  grave, arrutissak syllabifies as ar.ru.tis.sak, and la and ar are equally heavy, so the nasality moves left.)

Go home!

 


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