The sound system of Nognese reminded our scouts of Italian. They nicknamed it 'V' because of its open syllables.
V has five vowel phonemes that resolve to seven surface vowels. It has some diphthongs, but they're fairly transparent.
Geminates are present, represented in scouts' Latin orthography with double letters.
The /k/ phoneme tends to palatalize to [tʃ] before front vowels /e/ and /i/.
man\plc | bil | lbd | den/alv | psa | ret | pal | vel |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
nasal | m | n | ɲ | ||||
stop | p b | t d | ʈ ɖ | k ɡ | |||
affric | ts dz | tʃ dʒ | |||||
fric | f v | s z | |||||
trill | ʙ | r | |||||
approx | j | w | |||||
lat | l | ʎ |
Some dialects have [ʙ] as an allophone of /br/, or [ʈ:] and [ɖ:] as allophones of /rt/ and /rd/.
Accent is fairly but not always predictable, and not always marked in the standard orthography. Most words with a diphthong are accented on the diphthong. Most words with a geminate consonant are accented on the syllable preceding the geminate. Otherwise, there appears to be a primary accent on the penult, with a secondary accent on the first syllable.
Compared to the protolanguage, V has lost glottal stops, simplified some consonant clusters to geminates, and reduced velar fricatives to null. This can be seen especially with V words and their C cognates.
Categories: Languages of Noen