I devised this phonology for orthographical reasons, maybe you can come up with a better one - tones and vowel qualities are tricky
/vã6i-rɯ5ŋ-tɤ̃6/
Consonants
Voiceless stops: /p t k/
Prenasalised stops: /
mb
nd
ŋg/
Voiceless affricate: /ʧ/
Prenasalised affricate: /
nʤ/
Voiceless fricatives: /f s/
Voiced fricatives: /v ð/
Liquids: /l r/
Nasals: /m n ŋ/
Vowels
/i u e o a ɤ ɯ/
All vowels can be contrastively nasalised, and preaspirated, or both.
Tones
There are seven tones, which can appear on all vowels, and combine freely with both nasalisation and preaspiration. The following description uses a 5 level transcription, where 1 = lowest, 5 = highest:
Tone 1: Level: 44
Tone 2: Rising: 35
Tone 3 : Falling: 51
Tone 4: Dipping: 214
Tone 5: Peaking: 352
Tone 6: Broken: 11 - with concomitant glottalisation, realised as a glottal catch~creaky voice
Tone 7: Checked: 3 - shorter than the other tones, terminated by glottal stop
Toneless: - the equivalent of an unstressed syllable, occurs in grammatical particles and clitics, never on diphthongs.
Phonotactics
Syllable structure:
(C)(i,u,r)V(i,u,e,o)(S), where V can be any vowel, S ={
f s r m ng} or a glottal stop in checked tone syllables. Syllables with checked tone cannot have a coda consonant; the other six tones can co-occur freely with both open and closed syllables.
Nasalisation is non-contrastive before nasal codas
m ng and is not marked; vowels before nasal codas are allophonically nasalised (generally to a lesser degree than actual phonemic nasal vowels).
Sequences of identical vowels cannot occur.
Prevocalic
i u are realised as glides /j w/.
The only permitted onset clusters are
p t k mb nd ng m n ng followed by
r.
The glide
u cannot follow
f v.
Word-initial onsetless syllables are pronounced with an epenthetic glottal stop.
Back unrounded vowels cannot be preceded or followed by rounded vowels or glides.
A sample in (almost) IPA:
- Numbers after vowels are tones 1 - tone 7 as listed above, h is the voiceless onglide/preaspiration to the vowel
/
mbro2r ðe3 na1or nu4f nɤ4m
ndrha5ɤf kro6i ðe3ŋ ra3ɤ ka6us trha3ɤm prha7ɤ ndra7ɯm tɯ1 vã6i-rɯ5ŋ-tɤ̃6/
More phonotactic details at
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=37194&p=1072077#p1072077
if needed
