User:Ceige/SEA Inspired

Ancient stage

Phonology

Consonants

Bolded consonants can also be finals.

Manner	Labial	Dental	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar	Notes
Plosive	p	t	ʈ	c	k	Some reconstruct additional voiced plosives.
Pre-nasalised Plosives	ⁿp	ⁿt	ⁿʈ	ⁿc	ⁿk	ɴC or (m,n..)C is another valid style of transcription, as is C̃
Nasals	m	n	ɳ	ɲ	ŋ
Voiceless Nasals	m̊	n̊	ɳ̊	ɲ̊	ŋ̊	qC or hC is another valid style of transcription
Sonorants	w	l	r	y	ʀ	These are also sometimes analysed as appearing between initials and vowels.*
Voiceless Sonorants	ẘ	l̥	r̊	ẙ	ʀ̊
Fricatives	h*	s*	ʂ	ç	x

Notes

• *In analyses where the sonorants are seen as possible glides between initials and the nucleus, the distribution of initials changes quite heavily.
• There is also a glottal stop, sometimes written as <q>.
• <h> represents would-be /ɸ/, but this sound, when constructed, is meant to suggest a sound change before the voiceless labial sonorant arose. Some do not reconstruct it at all.
• <s> is argued by some to be /θ/.

Vowels

There are considerably less vowels than consonants, but these have a large number of environmental allophones.

Height	+y	+l	+Ø	+r	+ʀ	+w
Closed	i	ɪ	ɨ	ə	ɯ	u
Mid	e	ɜ	ǝ	ə	ʌ	o
Open	æ	æ	a	a	ɑ	ɑ

Phonotactics

Syllable structure

Each syllable has a structure of CVC, better described as Initial-Nucleus-Final.

Disallowed roots

Generally, the retroflex coronals cannot appear together in the Initial and Finals lots of the syllable, unless it is the exact same consonant (which is essentially analysed as vestigial reduplication). Thus, a retroflex initial or final should generally be paired with a dental initial or final.