Pkalho-Kolo 2

On this page : Phonology/Phonotactics and a brief English to Pkalho-Kölo Word-List. (Back to Basic Grammar on Pkalho-Kolo ) (Further Grammar on Pkalho-Kolo 3 ) ( Translated text on Pkalho-Kölo/A. )

I. A. Consonanants
Pkalho-Kölo has 24 consonants in the following order, from top to bottom then left to right: Let's try puting them on a table: those between slashes are allophones.

pk is a sound peculiar to the city of Pkalho, double-articulated, a simultaneous implosive p and plosive k, which could be written /ƥk/. Form the lips to pronounce a p and the back of the tongue to pronounce a k. The lips open with a pop, and at the same moment the k is released. pkw is the labialised version, /ƥkʷ/. fh is the corresponding fricative, which could be written /fç/

Labio-palatal cw contrasts with palatal c in its manner of articulation. The tip of the tongue touches the bottom teeth, while the blade of the tongue arches up to touch the palate. The corresponding fricative is fw, which could be written /ɕʷ/but the tongue should be in the same position as for cw. I illogically write fw because I was trying to avoid diacritcal marks, and I didn't like sw or chw. I am so accustomed to it now that I couldn't change it. Think of it as çw.

pw and kw are /pʷ/ and /kʷ/. pr could be written /pɭ / Native speakers regard it, like pk, as a single sound: no other initial consonant cluster occurs. All plosives are voiceless, unaspirated and lenis at the beginning of words and between vowels; after a nasal or lateral they tend to be slightly aspirated.

The fricative ph is /ɸ/ and th is /θ/. hw is the voiceless labio-velar /ʍ/

There are two nasals, m and n. The latter is /n/ at the beginning of a word, between vowels, and before t and n; before c and y it is /ɲ/; and before or after any other consonant it is /ŋ/

There are three laterals. lh is the interdental /l̪ /; compared to alveolar-palatal l it sounds "dark", ie velarised. rl is the post-alveolar /ɭ /: it has this sound at the beginning of a word and before or after another consonant. Its intervocalic allophone is the flap /r/.

I. B. Vowels
ä is the low rounded back vowel in British English “swan”. ë is a mid-central vowel, similar to the vowel in British English "her" but with the tongue drawn further back.

There are twelve diphthongs, six “like” (rounded + rounded, unrounded + unrounded) and six “unlike” (one rounded, one unrounded.)

II. Phonotactics
1. All root words end in a vowel

2. Syllables can end only in a vowel or the consonants m, n, rl, lh, or l.

3. A syllable can contain a diphthong or a final consonant, but not both. (The exception is when a one-syllable word containing a diphthong takes the relative suffix in its reduced form -n, or the -n of n-conjunctives.)

4. Words do not begin with a diphthong, though three words, au, ea and ui consist of a diphthong.

5. Words beginning with a vowel have glottal onset. Elision occurs only when the neutral demonstratives e and o follow the suffixes -la, -rë or -pë. Thus iturë en, (someone) said the following, becomes itur'en. (The word erä, person, human being, also loses its first vowel in compound words: velya (to play music) - velyarä (musician), kaulo (garden) - kaulorä (gardener), and the word for ten, thilä, loses its last vowel before ea, one: thilea, eleven; heru thilea, forty-one.)

6. When a word beginning with a vowel takes a directional prefix, or is extended by aspectual stem-modification, an epenthetic r is inserted. Thus olkwela (it resembles) - pkärolkwela (they resemble each other); ilurë (a light shone) - yërilurë (a light flashed for a moment). Word-initial rl keeps its pronunciation /ɭ / even after a prefix, as noted above.

Minor points: after m, the consonants k and kw are realised as pk and pkw. The sequences m+kw and m+pkw I always write mkw, regardless of the original script. After m, r and l the consonant hw becomes the labialised form of the bilabial fricative, /ɸʷ/, an allophone that occurs only in this context. The sequence l+hw I write lphw, to distinguish it from the sequence lh+w. The double consonants mm, nn, rll and ll occur frequently: doubled lh ought also to occur, but it seems to have been replaced by the rather rare sequence lh+th, which I write lth.

III. Intonation.
Pkalho-Kölo does not have word-stress: each syllable is pronounced with equal weight, allowing for natural variation. It does however have pitch accent: accented syllables are pronounced at a higher pitch. Four rules roughly cover this:

I. Directional prefixes have an accent which they only rarely lose.

II. One-syllable root words do not normally have an accent.

III. Two and three-syllable root words have an accent on the first syllable, which they lose when immediately preceded by a directional prefix.

IV. If two or three two-syllable modifiers precede a two-syllable word with a suffix, the second word loses the accent on its first syllable. If two two-syllable words precede a one-syllable word with a suffix, neither modifier loses its accent.

Actually there's more to it than that, but that’s enough for now.

(A translated text on Pkalho-Kölo/A)

I'm going to upload a couple of scans of Pkalho-Kölo in its own writing system. These were written a few years ago and the language has changed slightly, but they show what the script looks like.