I'm writing this while reading, so excuse me for writing in a way that trails back and forth.
Vardelm wrote:
If you look at 13-17 with the typical English pronunciation, it seems to be an alveolar series.
You mean postalveolar, right? Anyway, I'm looking at my own Finnish appendix, and it says that adding one stroke makes the glyph voiced, mirroring it makes it a fricative, and "adding a stroke to both sides makes it voiced and nasal". So one can deduct that 13 and 15 are unvoiced, while 14, 16 and 17 are voiced, 15 and 16 are fricatives while 17 is nasal. The question is, if 15 and 16 are fricatives, then what are 13 and 14? They could be either postalveolar plosives /t̠ d̠/ or affricates /tʃ dʒ/ if affricates group with the plosives. Anyway, so my guess is that 13-16 are /tʃ dʒ ʃ ʒ/. But is also says in my appendix that "13 and 15 were used for denoting s or h depending on if 35 was used for denoting s or h". So I'm confused. When it comes to 17 (it says "nj-z" in the appendix, and that the value to the right of the dash is the one used by the dwarves), I'm just gonna throw out some guesses: /n̠ ɲ ⁿz z̃ z/.
It says that the dwarves removed 14 and 16 and replaced them with 29 and 30. 34, 35 and 54 got the values h, ' (apparently a glottal stop which only appears before vowels) and s. Then it says that this lead to 12 getting the value r (strange since it's previous value was n, and neither n or r seem to have anything to do with 14, 16, 34, 35 or 54). The new glyph 53 was invented to denote n (because 12 just lost it's value of n). Ah, then it says they started to use 17 for z so that it would match the s value of 54 (they look the same except that 17 has one more stroke, which would denote voicing, so it seems that 17 indeed is /z/).
Gah, it's getting complicated. Anyway, from what I can gather from the appendix, the dwarves had at least the following phonemes:
Code:
/ n ŋ /
< 22/53 36 >
/ ⁿd ⁿɡ ʔ /
< 33 37 35>
/ dʒ ⁿdʒ /
< 29 38 >
/s z ʒ ç h /
<54 17 30 41 34>
/ r /
< 12 >
/a ö y/
<55 56 40>
I'm not sure about the nature of those phonemes I've marked as prenasalized. They are all transcribed with digraphs beginning with n. 41 is transcribed <hy>, so I'm guessing that's /ç/. The one marked y, I'm not sure if it's the vowel /y/ or the consonant /j/. There is already a vowel denoted ü (45) which to me suggests /y/, but 39 could apparently be both /i/ and /j/. <A> and <ö> stand for vowels whose qualities I don't know. It says "The new 55, 56 were originally halved forms of 46 and they were used for denoting a and ö type of vowels, which were common in both the Dwarven Tongue and Westron." In Finnish <a> is /ɑ/ and <ö> is /ø̞/. But that's so not enough information. Then it also says: "When they were weak and hardly audible, they were marked with just a stroke without the bar." To me it sounds like these vowels also had unvoiced versions.
Then there's the dwarves of Erebor, which had an even different orthography. Which one is Khuzdûl, or are both it?
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
