Arahuan is my new lang. It's spoken on an island in the South Pacific, but is a language isolate. I kind of wanted to go for the rhythm of languages with long and short vowels and consonants like Finnish and Japanese, but with a much more minimalist phonology.
Vowels:
There are three vowels.
Allophony:
/i/ = [i~ɪ~ɨ]
/u/ = [u~ʊ~ʉ]
/a/ = [ä~ɐ]
Each vowel is one mora long. Vowels may come together in any sequence, but only two vowels at a time. More than two vowels together are only found in loanwords, such as
uaihai "WiFi", which is five morae long [ˈuaihai].
Consonants:
There are six phonemic consonants.
Code: Select all
/m/ /n/ /ŋ/
/t/ /k/ [ʔ]
[ʍː] /h/
[ɾ]
Written as IPA, but ‹ŋ› can opionally be replaced with ‹g› if necessary.
All consonants can be single or geminate, although geminate /h/ is rare and seems to be falling out of the language. Geminates are possible word initially. Post-pausa, /tt/ and /kk/ are either pronounced as ejectives or similar to the faucalised consonants of Korean.
The gap where
p would be expected probably results from a sound change from /*p/ to /h/, similar to Japanese. These seems likely for two reasons:
- Geminate /h/, where it occurs, is labialised, something like [ʍː~ɸː]. A lot of speakers are simply pronouncing it nowadays as a single /h/, but some are dropping the length down to a non-moraic consonant, potentially giving rise to a new phonemic distinction
- Sandhi rules when adding suffixes pair /t/ with /n/, /k/ with /ŋ/ and /h/ with /m/, although the latter is a weaker pairing, only working from /h/ to /m/ and not the other way.
/t/ and /n/ are dental, rather than alveolar.
The plosives /t/ and /k/ are unaspirated. /t/ is pronounced as [ɾ] when non-geminate and not immediately before a stressed vowel. This is indicated in the official orthography, which includes ‹r›. Reduplication and compounding can block this to some extent, resulting in words such as
aaruara 'mountain' and
tuarua 'baby' having alternative forms:
aatuara and
tuatua.
There is an underlying glottal stop at the beginning of verb-initial morphemes which is only triggered post-pausa or when three or more vowels come together. When this occurs within a word, it is spelled ‹q› in the official orthography. For example
kiqaa
[ki.ˈʔaː]
ki-aa
3s.DEF.INAN-world
"It's the world."
In
uŋŋu utiunnuŋa ('
some guy is talking to her'), the two /u/s are pronounced together as a long vowel [ˈʔuŋːuːˈtiunːuŋa], but in
ŋua utiunnuŋa ('
he is talking to her') a glottal stop appears at the beginning of the second word because otherwise, three vowels would occur together.
Phonotactics:
(C(ː))V(ː)
There are no closed syllables.
Stress:
Stress is on the first syllable of roots, even in loanwords. Prefixes are unstressed. After a prefix, non-initial stress is marked by underlining.
Example text:
Ituu naammauhitta mutta Kahu uuruka. Ŋutta kummika tiika haaha. Tta Taki atiu kummika tiiqakka. Ŋatuu mukka hahannaaru. Nitiunnuŋa niniŋu.
