Phonological and Orthographical Issues Continued

[kadani]

Sounds unusual, in a good way.

[Dedalvs]

[Matthew Turnbull]

[Uh-Oh]

[Matthew Turnbull]

whoops, must have read something backwards

[alexfink]

Dangerous thing, to touch the phonology at this stage, but anyway:

Are there any instances of initial dj- yet? I don't note any. I propose that Ken. might have a constraint against initial dj. I also wonder whether there might be a constraint *gi (in roots, at least). I have for suggesting this.

(And, as long as I'm stirring up these waters, I'd be at least as happy to have initial ng as to lack it -- , just aesthetics. Can't tell from reading the thread if this issue is to be regarded settled.)

[alavda-isere]

[Matthew Turnbull]

According to my database we have no word initial dj, but we syllable initial dj, we have also
txate,tea(n)

txensa,sugar(n)
txulun,hunger(n)
that's all of the word initial tx that we have.

as for word initial ng, i think that i have no problem with it, I think that we could simply have some dialect with ng->m/#_. Problem solved.

[alavda-isere]

I was bored at work today, so I decided to go through the words in the lexicon list and do a rough letter/syllable frequency thing. I unfortunately didn't save it to where I could get to it when I got home, but there's something interesting that I do remember: as far as I can tell, with the exception of /ʒ/ (which only appears in two words, one of which is derived from the other), none of the words we've invented so far have voiced fricatives as codas. As soon as saw this, I was reminded of a phonological rule I learned about in one of my linguistics classes. Basically, some languages have this rule that voiced consonants become voiceless at the end of a word. It might have just been voiced stops, but since we don't have stops as codas (except for one morpheme that slipped through, the suffix -ik), that wouldn't apply. I was thinking maybe we could have a phonological rule in which voiced fricatives become voiceless at the end of a word. However, we could (and should, to make this interesting) coin words that have voiced stops underlyingly (and would be written <j> in the native orthography/romanization).
For example, to use the one root with /ʒ/ at the end:

baloj (noise, clatter) /baloʒ/ -> [baloʃ]

BUT

balojam /baloʒam/ -> [baloʒam]

(Note: I took -m to be the plurosingular, but I couldn't find what to do if I needed a vowel, so I just inserted one ).

Thoughts?

[Matthew Turnbull]

Since it arises organically from the lexicon, without the need to change any roots, I like it.