As is often done, I'll start with the
Phonology
Design Principles
Munutuni is designed to have an overall sound that I find displeasing, and in particular monotonous. To that end:
- It has a small set of sounds, while also having a small number of environments for them and distinguishing just the right POA and MOA contrasts so that certain likely paths for allophony/sound change are made less likely
- It has a very small number of legal syllables, so that the average number of syllables per morpheme is high
- It has the least interesting prosody possible
- It is missing basically any type of sound, phonemically and phonetically, that I have to hold myself back from adding if I'm leaving it out of a language (defying my own instincts is going to be a big part of designing this language)
EDIT: Linguolabial counterparts to the bilabials were added later, along with a mid central vowel. This early version is preserved for reference.
Munutuni distinguishes seven consonants and three vowels. They are listed below with their orthographic representations.
/m n p t k f s/ m n p t k f s
/i u a/ i u a
I was considering including voiced stops, but I decided against it because most of the languages I'm aware of with especially small inventories have significant allophony in voiced stops, such as having them vary with fricatives, liquids, glides, or nasals. I also avoided other sounds that tend to shift especially easily, so all postvelars and all velars besides /k/ were out. I did decide to include some fricatives, in particular /s/ to reduce the motivation for the very common shift in small consonant inventories of [t] > [s] / _i. I left out liquids and glides because both are types of sound I find difficult to leave out. (I have a hard enough time making languages with only a single liquid!) I also left them out because of their tendency to color vowels, which I normally like but obviously don't want here. The vowels are the smallest vowel system that doesn't normally have massive allophonic variation.
Phonetics
The coronals are apico-alveolar. The stops are as classically tenuis as can be, with a VOT near zero in all circumstances. The vowels mostly stick near the extremes of the vowel space. There's very little allophony worth noting. As in most languages that don't phonemicize palatalization or labialization, all consonants are mildly palatalized before /i/ (or, strictly speaking, fronted in the case of /k/) and mildly rounded before /u/. Vowels may optionally nasalize in the vicinity of nasal consonants.
Phonotactics
The only allowed syllables are CV. All combinations of C and V are allowed, yielding 21 possible syllables.
Prosody
Munutuni has neither contrastive stress nor contrastive tone. Any phonetic stress it may have is volume-based, very weak, and tending to appear on alternating syllables beginning with the first syllable after a pause. All syllables have a uniform length, and thus the language is syllable-timed by default. This and the low-sonorant inventory give the language a characteristic staccato sound.
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Let me know what you think about the phonology so far. The main theme I'm going for is "boring, but not by way of being average", so if you think I've missed a major way to do that, tell me.
I have some ideas for grammar coming up. Get ready for lots of defective fusional declensions and conjugations that are still complex enough to warrant tables, and an extremely pervasive masculine/feminine distinction.