I've got a reasonable idea of what the history of this island is, but am slightly unsure on whether it's currently a dependency of Denmark (like Greenland or the Faroes), or the UK (like the Isle of Man).
Phonology
Liedansk has a vowel inventory consisting of ten monophthongs and four diphthongs. The thirteen monophthongs are as follows:
The four diphthongs can be classified into two sets: centering and closing. All four are falling diphthongs, characterised by an initial element of higher prominence and an off-glide of lower prominence.
The full complement of monophthongs (with the exception of /ǝ/) only occurs in stressed syllables. Post-tonic syllables are restricted to the vowels /ɛ ɔ æ/, while pretonic syllables exhibit only /ɪ ʏ ɛ ɔ æ/. Note that when unstressed, the open-mid vowels tend to be somewhat closer, verging towards [e̞ o̞], and post-tonic /æ/ moves to the centre of the vowel space, being pronounced [ǝ].
The consonant inventory comprises sixteen phonemes, shown in the table below:
A few salient allophonic processes to note:
- The voiceless palatal stop /c/ is more frequently realised as a palatal affricate [c͡ç].
- Adjacent to a front vowel, the velar fricative /x/ has a palatal allophone [ç].
- When in absolute initial position and followed by a non-front vowel, the velar fricative /x/ is pronounced [h].
- The voiceless alveolar and labiodental fricatives /f s/ have voiced allophones [v z] when intervocalic or medially following /r/ or /l/.
- The cluster /sc/ is pronounced [ʃ].
- The alveolar lateral /l/ has a velar allophone [ɫ] in syllable codas.
- The alveolar nasal /n/ has the allophones [ŋ] before a velar consonant and [ɲ] before a palatal consonant.
- Between an unstressed vowel and a consonant, nasals disappear, with compensatory nasalisation of the preceding vowel: /ˈliːdǝns/ > [ˈliːdǝ̃s]
Orthography
Liedansk orthography, while broadly phonemic, does not have a perfect one-to-one match between phoneme and grapheme. In particular, the representation of the fourteen vocalic phonemes with only six letters of the Latin alphabet presents some problems. This is complicated somewhat by the fact that Liedansk has an established literary tradition going back to the eleventh century, and the orthography has developed organically throughout the intervening period, with only a limited number of ad hoc spelling reforms along the way.
Vowel and diphthongs are generally represented in a straightforward fashion, with little ambiguity of pronunciation arising from spelling. However, there is not a strict one-to-one correspondence between phoneme and grapheme. Rather, several phonemes have multiple graphical representations. In the table below, the most common grapheme is given first, with alternatives in decreasing order of frequency.
From the above table, the only ambiguities arising are the infrequent representation of /ɔː/ by â, of /ɪ/ by y and of /iː/ by i. The first occurs only in a handful of words, most common among them being the preposition â ‘at, on’. The latter two cases are rather more difficult, with those words using y to represent /ɪ/ and i to represent /i/ must simply be learnt as exceptions. It is worth noting, however, that such exceptions are rare, and normally confined to a handful of high-frequency words, such as the preposition i /iː/ ‘in’.
The representation of consonants is, by and large similar, although variation between graphemes tends to be rather more predictable:
In several cases above where there are two possible graphemes for one phoneme, they are in fact positional variants of each other. For example, ck occurs instead of kk, while ch is found word-medially and h word-initially. The grapheme v only occurs in loan words, such as universita /ʏnɪversɪˈtæ/ ‘university’.
The representation of the voiceless palatal and velar stops is slightly more complex. Essentially, before i, ie, e and ê, the grapheme k represents /c/, as /k/ does not occur in these positions. Before any other vowel grapheme, the palatal stop is represented by the digraph ki, thus kiaelda ‘well’ unambiguously represents /ˈcɛːldæ/. However, this does creates some ambiguity: does kiatla ‘kettle’ represent /ˈcætlæ/ or /ˈciǝ̯tlæ/? In this case, the former, but the orthography does not have any strategy for disambiguation.
Finally, a note about the representation of /j/ by z: in older Liedansk /j/ was normally represented by ȝ, a grapheme used in Middle Liedansk for /ɣ~j/. When movable type arrived in Liedan, most typesets lacked this special character and substituted it for the graphically similar z, whence the modern convention.
Actually, this is pretty similar to what happened in Scotland as well. I'm still vaguely tempted to keep the yogh anyway.
