Praseo phonology

Consonants

Phoneme set and standard orthography

The following chart gives all of the consonant phonemes in Praseo in the linguistic orthography, together with their core phonetic values.

	Labial	Dental	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar
Voiceless stop	p [p]	t [t]			k [k]
Voiced stop	b [b]	d [d]			g [g]
Voiceless fricative		s [s]	ś [ʂ]	š [ɕ]	h [x]
Voiced fricative		z [z]
Voiceless affricate		ts [ts]		č [tɕ]
Voiced affricate				j [dʑ]
Nasal	m [m]	n [n]
Liquid		l [l]
		r [r]
Semivowel	o [w]			y [j]

The most peculiar aspect of the orthography is that the semivowel [w] is consistently rendered as o, regardless of position in the word. Thus, the word oirde is [wirde], and taoma is [tawma]. The phoneme [j], on the other hand, is only spelled as y when it is a syllable onset; as the second part of a diphthong it's spelled i, giving yalu [jalu], but aisa [ajsa].

Vowels

Praseo has four oral vowels, three nasal vowels, and three diphthongs which can also be nasalized.

Oral vowels	Nasal vowels
i u
e	ẽ [ɛ̃] õ [ɔ̃]
a	ã [ã]

Diphthongs

Oral diphthongs	Nasal diphthongs
ei [ej]	ẽi [ɛ̃j]
eo [ew]	ẽo [ɛ̃w]
ao [aw]	ão [ãw]

All of the diphthongs in Praseo are falling diphthongs, and the exact quality of the second part of the diphthong is not explicitly specified. I've shown them above as semivowels, but the second part of ei may be as low as [ɪ], and the second part of ao may be [ɔ]. In nasalized diphthongs, the nasalization generally holds throughout the nasalized syllable.

Stress placement

Praseo has a very strong word-level stress, which is predictable based on the morphology and phonology of the word. Stress in a Praseo word falls on the penultimate syllable, unless:

• The final syllable is morphologically marked as stressed (as in a few noun cases and verb forms)
• The final syllable is nasalized
• The final syllable contains a diphthong

In these cases, the final syllable is stressed.

Morphologically stressed final syllables are indicated with an acute accent on the vowel. This is the only way to distinguish between, for example, razi [ˈra.zi] ("heads (nom.pl.)") and razí [raˈzi] ("head (construct sg.)"). Other cases in which the final syllable is stressed are not marked, since the final stress can be inferred from the nasalization of the final vowel or the presence of a diphthong.

Because Praseo stress is so regular, it is not usually indicated in my phonetic transcriptions.

Book orthography

The orthography given above is used for precise transliterations of Praseo, and is used throughout this site and in the Praseo lexicon. However, a slightly different orthography is used for names and bits of text which occur in Storm Bride and other books featuring the Praseo language. (See Why I Use a Book Orthography.)

For the Praseo book orthography, the following substitutions are made:

Standard orthography	Book orthography
ś	s
š	sh
č	ch
ẽ	e
ã	a
õ	o

As a consequence of these substitutions, there are no diacritics found in the book orthography of Praseo: nasal vowels are not distinguished from oral vowels, and the phonemes s [s] and ś [ʂ] are not distinguished.

Allophonic processes

Nasalization and nasal place assimilation

Sound changes early in the history of Praseo resulted in most coda nasals being lost and converted to nasalization on the preceding vowel. However, when the coda nasal was immediately followed by an obstruent (stop or fricative), the nasal is retained in pronunciation and orthography, and is pronounced at the same place of articulation as the following stop. These homoorganic stops are always written with n except when followed by a labial, in which case they are written with n.

Orthography	Pronunciation
mb	[mb]
nd	[nd]
nś	[ɳʂ]
nj	[ɲʑ]
ng	[ŋg]

Vowels preceding such syllable-final nasals are still nasalized, but they are written without the tilde.

Vowel nasalization spreads to the left in Praseo until it meets a voiceless obstruent or a word boundary. Thus a word with a final nasal vowel which does not contain a voiceless obstruent, the entire word may be nasalized. As suggested by the vowel chart above, vowels in Praseo are lowered under nasalization, and the distinction between i and e is neutralized (though the orthography always presents the underlying nasalized front vowel as ẽ). This applies to allophonically nasalized vowels as well as underlying nasalized vowels; however, allophonically nasalized i and u are generally spelled using the underlying vowel, if it can be recovered.

Orthography	Pronunciation
ezande	[ɛ̃zãnde]
urhõ	[urxɔ̃]
zulõ	[zɔ̃lɔ̃]

The word zulõ above provides an example of how the spelling of a vowel in the stem is unchanged under allophonic nasalization.

Voice assimilation

Obstruent clusters in Praseo always agree in voice, and the first element in the cluster is changed to agree in voice with the second. (This does not occur with clusters of obstruents and sonorants, however.) This occasionally generates phones which do not otherwise occur, such as the voiced retroflex spirant [ʐ], an allophone of ś, or the voiced palatal fricative [ʑ], an allophone of š.

Affricate simplification

If an affricate occurs in a consonant cluster, it is reduced to its fricative part. The spelling of the affricate is generally unchanged in this scenario. This does include clusters with sonorants, so that ačru is pronounced [aɕru].