Kivatu: Difference between revisions

From Linguifex
Jump to navigation Jump to search
No edit summary
No edit summary
 
Line 46: Line 46:
| || l || w̥ w || j̥ j
| || l || w̥ w || j̥ j
|}
|}
====Voiceless consonants====
Kivatu has more voiceless consonants than other languages. In particular, voiceless nasals(/m̥/ and /n̥/) and voiceless approximants(/w̥/ and /j̥/) are common in the language. Of these abnormal voiceless consonants, /w̥/ is the most common across most vocabulary, and thus has its own letter, ⟨v⟩, while the other voiceless consonants simply use the letter for their more common voiced counterpart, with a ⟨’⟩ added, e.g. ''j'' [j] and ''j’'' [j̥].


===Vowels===
===Vowels===

Latest revision as of 09:15, 22 May 2024

Kivatu
Kiuatou
vatu k’vatu
Pronunciation[w̥atu kʼw̥atu]
Created byJukethatbox
Date2024
Native toKivatu Archipelago
EthnicityK’wa, Kokosi and Kikiñ peoples
Native speakers~70,000 (2024)
~31,850 K’wa
~21,980 Kokosi
~15,890 Kikiñ
~280 other
This article contains IPA phonetic symbols. Without proper rendering support, you may see question marks, boxes, or other symbols instead of Unicode characters. For an introductory guide on IPA symbols, see Help:IPA.

Kivatu(vatu k’vatu, pronounced: [w̥atu kʼw̥atu]), also called Kiuatou, is a language isolate spoken natively in the Kivatu Archipelago by the K’wa, Kokosi and Kikiñ people in order of population. There are a total of about 70,000 native speakers of Kivatu, with 45.5% being ethnically K’wa, 31.4% being Kokosi, 22.7% being Kikiñ and the remaining 0.4% being other unspecified ethnicities.

Phonology

Consonants

Bilabial Coronal Velar Palatal
Plosive pulmonic p b t d k g
ejective pʼ bʼ tʼ dʼ
Nasal m̥ m n̥ n (ŋ) ɲ
Trill r
Fricative pulmonic ɸ~f s z ç
palatalised sʲ zʲ
(Lateral) Approximant l w̥ w j̥ j

Voiceless consonants

Kivatu has more voiceless consonants than other languages. In particular, voiceless nasals(/m̥/ and /n̥/) and voiceless approximants(/w̥/ and /j̥/) are common in the language. Of these abnormal voiceless consonants, /w̥/ is the most common across most vocabulary, and thus has its own letter, ⟨v⟩, while the other voiceless consonants simply use the letter for their more common voiced counterpart, with a ⟨’⟩ added, e.g. j [j] and j’ [j̥].

Vowels

Front Central Back
Close i ʉ~u
Close-mid e o~o̞
Open a ɑ

Phonotactics

All CV and V syllables are possible in Kivatu, though VC syllables do appear sometimes in some loanwords, like b’at, "baseball bat", from Indonesian batang, or robok, "robot", from English robot.