zompist bboard

Okay, but what about outside of there?

Off the top of my head I can't think of any four vowel systems outside of North America, though I'm sure they exist; every Old World language I can think of at the moment is either three vowel, five vowel, or "monster Indo-European craziness" vowel. :p NB, though, that most four-vowel systems I can think of are transcribed with either /o/ or /u/ by convention, as there tends to be a lot of allophonic variation between [o] and [u] in such languages, so one might just as well call them /i e o~u a/.

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"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

Four vowel systems are very common .... it's just that it's usually /a i u ə/, so it's balanced. /a i u ə/ ,might even be the most common system in the entire world.

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Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:

Nah, that would be five-vowel. Old post to the rescue!

The working vowel system is below noting my indecision on the mid front vowel's transcription and that having the mid back rounded vowel (/o̞ ⱺ/; last is non-standard but used) felt strange with three unrounded vowels.

Not nearly as strange as having no back rounded vowels...

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"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

Could [e̞ʋ~ᴇʋ ɑʋ] be considered vowels since [ʋ] takes [w]'s place? If so, would they be rounded or unrounded?

I don't think so, sorry.

Is /[χ]/ more naturally an allophone of /x/ or /h/? Currently, the relationship is /[x→χ]/ adjacent to /ɑ ⱺ/ regardless of syllable coda/mora or another uvular in the same syllable.

It definitely makes more sense to me for [x] to be an allophone of /x/ than of /h/. (Even if the symbols used for phonemes are arbitrary anyway).

This looks like a display issue....some phones can't display the Greek chi symbol so it just appears as a simple x.

No comment/opinion on the question.

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Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:

I'm on a desktop computer, and I don't see any chi's anywhere on this page.

[χ] seems more likely to be an allophone of /x/ than /h/ if both /x h/ are phonemic; if not, either one of them could have some pretty broad-ranging allophones (as for example in Japanese or Finnish).

@Vijay: The first symbol in yangfiretiger121's post is definitely chi in my browser.

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"But if of ships I now should sing, what ship would come to me,
What ship would bear me ever back across so wide a Sea?”

Aha, it is for me, too, if I use Chrome instead of Mozilla!

Revised vowel system:



However, words with a consonant immediately followed by <ru>, such as Grut, maintain the uvulars in front of /ʉ/. Thus, ['ɢᴿut] becomes ['ɢᴿʉt].

You can have syllabic labiodental approximant / labiodentalized [u] as a vowel, e.g. Nias. If there are sequences that behave phonologically like diphthongs (what does this mean for your language?) but are phonetically realized as a vowel followed by a labiodental approximant, I would expect /u/ to also be labiodentalized but these sequences could be analyzable as diphthongs.

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Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

Would [y ɔ] be believable transcriptions of [ᴇʋ ɑʋ] as vowels, or would [ᴇʋ ɑʋ] need different transcriptions?

Is [m n→ɴ] adjacent to back vowels a likely assimilation?

Are [pʃ bʒ] better described as bilabial-postalveolar ([p̱ʃ ḇʒ]) or labiodental-postalveolar ([p̪ʃ b̪ʒ])?