Tydotsuy phonology

Consonants

The following table shows all the consonants. Between slashes is the IPA sound, and between angle brackets is the romanization that I'm using.

* The glottal stop exists only as one possible realization of the underspecified stop, described below.

Underspecified stop

The end of a syllable may have an underspecified stop, which takes its place of articulation from the following sound, and, depending on the following sound, may be unreleased. This sound is represented differently in the romanization depending on its realization.

• Before a stop: The underspecified stop causes the following stop to be pronounced as a geminate (long consonant; [pː], [pːʰ], [bː], [tː], [tːʰ] [dː]). In the romanization, this is written with the consonant doubled (pp, pph, bb, tt, tth, dd).
• Before a nasal: The stop takes the place of articulation of the nasal sound and is unreleased. In the romanization, this is written as pm, tn.
• Before a fricative: The fricative becomes a geminate affricate. In the romanization, this is written as p (before f) or t (before others) followed by the fricative.
• Before /l/: the stop becomes /t/, and the combination may be pronounced as an affricate. Written tl.
• Before a vowel, w, j, h: the stop becomes a glottal stop, which is written '.
• At the end of the word: depends on the first consonant of the next word. At the end of a phrase, becomes an unreleased stop. Romanized as t.

Vowels

Diphthongs allowed: ai, ei, ie, ea, oy, uy, yu, uo. Despite being written differently, in most dialects, ie and ea are both pronounced [iə]; likewise, yu and uo are both pronounced [yʊ]~[yø]. The other diphthongs are pronounced as expected.

Non-diphthong vowels may be long. This is romanized by doubling the vowel (aa, ee, ii, oo, uu, yy).

Phonotactics

Syllable onset

A syllable onset can be:

• Any single consonant other than a glottal or underspecified stop.
• f, þ, s, or sh, followed by any consonant other than f, þ, s, sh, h, or a glottal or underspecified stop.
• Any of the above followed by w.
• Or no consonant at all.

With the additional restriction that r cannot occur at the beginning of a word, after an underspecified stop, or after any sound articulated with the tip of the tongue. (So it can occur between two vowels or after f.)

w before rounded vowels is often not pronounced. Likewise, j is often not pronounced before i and y.

Syllable coda

A syllable coda can be:

• An underspecified stop.
• Any of the following single consonants: l, lh, f, þ, s, sh, h. (These do not usually occur as syllable codas within a word.)
• Or no consonant at all.

Syllables with long vowels can't have codas.

Vowel harmony

Each word usually has either all rounded vowels or all unrounded vowels. At a labial consonant (p, ph, b, f, w), the word can switch between rounded and unrounded vowels. Affixes usually take the vowel roundedness from the root of the word, except for a few that are explicitly specified as triggering vowel harmony, in which case the root takes the roundedness from the affix. When vowels switch roundedness, they switch to the other vowel in the same row below:

Fricative harmony

Each word has only one of the sounds þ, s, sh. If an affix is added to a word, and both words have one of those sounds, the sound used is taken from the root of the word.

Allophony

• If a word ends in one of the fricatives þ, s, sh, and the next word begins with another fricative from that set, the first fricative may assimilate to be the same as the second fricative. Alternatively, the combinations þ-sh and sh-þ may cause the first sound to become [s].
• Syllable-final h followed by a fricative may cause the h to become the same sound as the fricative (this is less likely for lh). Syllable-final h followed by a voiced consonant may cause the second consonant to become unvoiced, especially if it's a stop; syllable-final h followed by an l can cause the following l to become lh.
• Fricative + voiced stop in the same syllable can cause the fricative to become voiced.
• Prenasalized stops are most common at the beginning of an utterance.
• /o/ is generally [o] when long and [ɔ] when short.

Stress

Stress always occurs on the second-to-last syllable in each word, excluding clitics, unless the last syllable has a long vowel (not a diphthong), in which case the last syllable gets stress. (Syllable, not mora.) If a word is one syllable long, stress occurs on the only syllable. Tydotsuy uses a pitch accent: the stressed syllable of a word is pronounced at a high pitch (relative to the surrounding syllables), syllables after the stressed syllable are pronounced at a low pitch, and syllables before the stressed syllable are pronounced at a medium pitch. Examples (not real words, just made up for demonstration):

• e: é (stress occurs on the only syllable)
• ete: éte
• etete: etéte
• etetete: etetéte
• etee: etéé (the word ends in a long vowel)
• etei: étei (diphthongs count as a single syllable, though)
• eete: ééte
• eetee: eetéé
• eetei: éétei (diphthongs still count as single syllables)
• etetese (assuming se is a high-volition marker): etétese (the clitic doesn't affect the stress; the penultimate syllable of the main word etete is stressed)
• dete (assuming de is a definite article): deté (the clitic doesn't affect the stress; since the main word is te, it's stressed)

Some function words, such as focus particles and article-like determiners, behave like proclitics with regards to stress (they have medium pitch), but do not otherwise behave like clitics (e.g., they don't participate in vowel harmony).

Timing

Tydotsuy is mora-timed; each syllable is either one or two morae long, and each mora takes about the same time to say. Syllables that end in a short, non-diphthong vowel are one mora long, and any other syllable is two morae (including syllables that have both a diphthong and a coda consonant; in that case, the diphthong takes up one mora and the coda consonant the other). The underspecified stop always counts as one mora, regardless of its realization; the stop isn't released during its mora.

In determining whether a consonant goes with the next or previous syllable, Tydotsuy prefers syllables that start with a single consonant, or a single consonant followed by w, when allowed by the phonotactics. Word boundaries are always syllable breaks. Examples:

• ete: e-te, two morae (no ambiguity because the first syllable can't end in a fully-specified t)
• ese: e-se, two morae (could be es-e, but e-se has a syllable that starts with a single consonant)
• es e: es-e, three morae (if it's two words, the word boundary determines the syllabification)
• eswe: e-swe, two morae (e-swe has a syllable that starts with a single consonant followed by a w)
• este: es-te, three morae (could also be e-ste, but es-te has a syllable that starts with a single consonant)
• eeste: ee-ste, three morae (no ambiguity, syllables with long vowels can't end in consonants)
• ette: et-te, three morae (no ambiguity, the first t must be the underspecified stop, which can only go at the end of a syllable)
• e'e: e'-e, three morae (glottal stop can only be at the end of a syllable, as one realization of the underspecified stop)
• efse: ef-se, three morae (no ambiguity, fs is not allowed as a syllable onset or coda)
• ai: ai, two morae
• a·i: a-i, two morae (syllabification of vowel clusters is phonemic)
• espi (assuming spi is a comitative marker): es-pi, three morae (the fact that spi is a clitic doesn't affect the timing)

Clitics

Clitics are things that behave like words with respect to how they're placed in a sentence, but affixes with respect to phonology. Tydotsuy has two types of clitic: enclitics (clitics that attach to the word before, like a suffix) that mark the case of a noun phrase, and proclitics (clitics that attach to the word after, like a prefix) that are articles. Behavior of clitics in Tydotsuy:

• Clitics participate in vowel harmony; they take vowel roundedness from their host.
• Clitics are not treated as part of the word when determining which syllable has stress.
• Clitics are treated as an ordinary part of the word for determining timing and syllabification
• When a proclitic that ends in a short vowel is followed by a word that begins in a short vowel, the vowels combine into diphthongs or long vowels (though this process does not affect writing). If a long vowel is not phonologically allowed, the long vowel turns into a short vowel.

  	a=, ha=	de=, ne=
  a	aa	ea
  e	ai	ee
  i	ai	ei
  o	oo	uo
  u	oy	uu
  y	oy	uy

• When the clitic =elh follows a vowel, it takes the form =lh.
• When the clitic =se is followed by a word that starts with a vowel, it becomes s= and attaches to the following word. This is not reflected in the writing.
• Clitics are written as part of the word. Enclitics use reduced versions of the letters.
• When a proclitic's last letter is the same as the first letter of the host word, or an enclitic's first letter is the same as the last letter in the host word, the resulting written word has a double letter, but it's pronounced the same as if there were a single letter there.
• In the romanization, clitics can be separated from their host words with =.

Foreign words

Foreign words may violate the phonology and phonotactics in the following ways:

• Velar consonants: Depending on the speaker, these may be pronounced as velars, or they may be pronounced as alveolar consonants. Romanization: /kʰ/ ‹kh›, /k/ ‹k›, /ɡ/ ‹g›, /ŋ/ ‹ng›, /ç, x, χ/ ‹x›.
• Syllable-final nasals: These may be pronounced as syllable-final, or they may get an extra vowel after them
• TODO vowel harmony, stress,

Other notes on the romanization

· separates syllables between vowels (e.g., ie is a diphthong, i·e is two syllables), and separates digraphs when necessary. In pure ASCII, this can be written -.

In pure ASCII, þ can be written c (there's no good way to make a pure-ASCII romanization of this...)

Accent marks (´) can be used to indicate the stressed syllable, when it's different than usual (due to clitics).