And I'm curious about the root for nine. Is it from "almost" or "without" or any such thing? Since it doesnt seem to be related to the root for four. (This was more or less my strategy. I had basic noncompound roots for 1 to 5 and for 10, and derived the word for 9 from the word for "almost". I believe six was derived from "five plus" and eight was "four twice", making 7 the only word of the basic ten I dont have an etymology for.)cromulant wrote:The "pseudo base 5" thing (straight base 10 with 5 as an additive subbase) is attested in a gigantic number of natlangs.
Are there minimal pairs? I wouldnt know how to deal with this, if I was trying to distinguish two words that I know have different pronunciations but are impossible to tell apart in isolation. I guess the logical answer would be to spell them out. I'm curious how Hawaiian handles the situation though.Chengjiang wrote:The glottal stop isn't very acoustically salient utterance-initially, but if it's good enough for Hawaiian, it's good enough for Chavakani.
I like the tone setup, especially given that a lot of tonal conlangs seem to brush away sandhi. If this is a realistic tonal system I may want to use some of the ideas for sandhi in later conlangs. High vs low vs falling is probably a common inventory cross-linguistically.
I like this.Chavakani also has a "macho"/"boasting" speech register, whose phonological traits include making the voiceless stops and affricate weakly ejective, substituting [x] for /h/, and substituting a full trill [r] for /ɾ/.