Okay vowels... These are interesting. Soleani is kind of in between Spanish and English in this aspect because English vowels are quite messy, and in Spanish every vowel has one sound per letter. Soleani has 7 phonemic vowels, with a total of 13 sounds. Every vowel, except for <e>, has a base form and a reduced counterpart. <e>'s reduced form is exactly the same as the base form.
This is pretty simple because it is based on the phonotactics (the way sounds are put together to form words) of Soleani, which require that syllables be extremely simple. There are only 4 possible syllable structures in Soleani, 2 of which can only be found at the beginning of a word.
At any spot in the word, the syllable can take two forms. It can begin with a consonant, and be followed by a vowel. Or it can do the exact same thing as previously, and then end with a consonant. (CV, CVC)
But at the beginning of a word, and only at the beginning of the word, you can have a single vowel, or you can have a single vowel followed by one consonant. (V or VC).
That's where the two types of vowels come in. The base form of the vowel is the sound the vowel makes when the syllable in which it is the nucleus has no coda (consonant ending). An example of a syllable like this would be 'ka'.
The reduced form occurs when the syllable
does have a coda. The vowel sound is "stopped short" and mutates to a different, related sound, such as in the syllable 'kak'.
Both of these types use the same letter because, to a Soleani speaker, if you switched the sounds out, it would sound weird, but it wouldn't change the word, because the vowels aren't truly "different".
There is another type of vowel, which
is different, despite having the same sound as other vowels. This is the long vowel. A long vowel is any vowel marked with an acute accent, such as ú in «kúta». It will take the base form's sound, but will be spoken for twice as long. It's sound will not be reduced, even if the syllable it occurs in is capped by a consonantal coda. I say it is different because the word «kúta» is not the same as the word «kuta».
The seven Soleani vowels are, in their base form:
a - the basic 'ah' sound, pretty much like english 'caught/cot'
e - 'eh' sound in 'bet'
i - 'ee' in 'beet' - this form is used for the long vowel, but in normal form is always reduced unless it's at the end of the word
o - like Spanish o, but without lip rounding. it sounds kind of like 'foot' (but not quite)
u - 'ooh' sound such as in 'boot'
w - schwa sound. unstressed vowel pretty common in english 'concentrat
ion'
y - this sound is in some dialects of english, usually rhotacized, such as in 'bird' pretty similar to w/schwa.
IPA: [a ɛ i ɤ u ə ɜ]
Remember: i does not use it's base form unless it ends the word (or of course, is long)
The reduced forms:
a - 'aa' in 'bat'
e - As stated before, e's sound does not change.
i - 'ih' in 'kit'
o - 'ah' with rounded lips, much more so than it's occurrence in English
u - 'uh' in 'bun'
w - 'oo' without rounded lips
y - relatively common sound in English, colloquially called schwi sometimes, because it's a centralized i sound. the sound of the 'e' in the suffix 'es' such as in 'horses'
IPA: [æ ɛ ɪ ɒ ʌ ɯ ɨ]
All of the long vowels reset any sound changes to the base form and are "repeated" for twice the length.
And just to throw a wrench in your comprehension of Soleani vowels... Not all syllable nuclei are created equal. They don't all have vowels. They can have sonorants! But only some of them. In place of a vowel, a syllable in Soleani can have l, n, ŋ, or r. Soleani treats these exactly like vowels. So I guess they are. But by technical definition they aren't.
These sonorants do not have reduced forms, but r changes it's sound.
l - same as consonant sound
n - same as consonant sound
ŋ - same as consonant sound
r - r's sound changes because the consonant form is not a sonorant (it's not a sound that can have a pitch or be held for varying amounts of time). in this case, it uses the English r sound, the approximant.
Oh right, and there's also uvularized vowels. Fortunately for you guys, there's only three of them. They are marked with carons/háčeks, and take the same base form of the vowel which they are marked on.
These vowels are ǎ, ǐ, and ǔ.
For each of the vowels, you put your tongue in the position of <kh>, but the vowel <a>, <i>, or <u> is pronounced at the same time. This results in voicing (sounding more like French r) and an interesting sonorant-like effect. These can be difficult to co-articulate in a word, such as «tǔni».
Tomorrow... some words!
Topic: Standard Soleani Lessons (Read 4322 times)
