Balancing and sound changes?

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LinguistCat
Avisaru
Avisaru
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Balancing and sound changes?

Post by LinguistCat »

Ok so, I made this phoneme inventory for a conlang based on Classical Japanese for a non human species to speak. This is mostly a balance question and where things could go from this:

/p b m t d n k g N/
/s z C/
/j w r/

/i e a o u/
/i: e: a: o: u:/

/p/ and /N/ are both rare phonemes and /N/ could be considered an allophone of /n/ and /m/ in certain environments. /t/ and /d/ are often pronounced as /ts/ and /dz/ interchangeably. Voiced stops and /z/ are prenasalized, and along with /n/ and /m/ can cause vowels directly preceding them inside a word to nasalize. The true nasals are slightly palatalized before vowels and other nasals.

So with common allophonic changes, the inventory looks more like

[p mb m_j ts ndz n_j k Ng]
[s nz C]
[j w r]

[i i~ e e~ a a~ o o~ u u~]
[i: i~: e: e~: a: a~: o: o~: u: u~:]

I've already decided that the prenasalized consonants would drop their nasalization early on. At some point the nasal vowels would lower (or in the case of /a~ a~:/ they'll probably back), and I'd also like there to be a distinction between a rhotic tap and trill, possibly realized as a length distinction of /r/. On a more vague note, I want to do something with /C/ but not turning it into /P\/ like Japanese has since that'll get borrowed back from Japanese later and I don't really want them to merge (tho they could in writing at least temporarily), as well as some vowel changes before doing something big with nasals and voiced stops+/z/.

Is there anything about those changes that seem unbalanced? I'd like to add in some more conditional sound changes since they tend to be more common from what I remember seeing.
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