Owaex

Owaex is a conlang I made up, having a relitively small amount of rules, charaters, and words to deal with.

The basics are the characters:
 * n
 * h
 * H (huffing sound; can be prononced like an h)
 * t
 * T (retroflex t)
 * a (ah)
 * u (oo)
 * e (eh)

General information
I'm not an expert at IPA or understanding all the grammer, but, I do love to make languages.

Consonants
The following are phonemic transcriptions of Rangyan consonants.


 * 1) /ŋ/ appears only in the syllable coda.
 * /s, z/ are palatalised [ɕ, ʑ] before /i, j/
 * 1) /h/ is palatalised [ç] before /i, j/; and is bi­la­bialised [ɸ] before /u, w/
 * 2) /ts, dz, tsʰ/ are palatalised [tɕ, dʑ, tɕʰ] before /i, j/
 * 3) /ɾ/ is an alveolar flap [ɾ] in the syllable onset; and is [l] in the syllable coda.

Monophthongs

 * 1) /i/ is pronounced /ɪ/ before velar codas /ŋ, k̚/
 * 2) /u/ is /ʊ/ before velar codas /ŋ, k̚/

Diphthongs
In the Rangyan language, because semivowels /j/ and /w/ may follow consonants in initial position in a word, which no other consonant can do, and perhaps due also to yenmun orthography, which transcribes them as vowels, they are sometimes considered to be elements of diphthongs and triphthongs rather than separate consonant phonemes.


 * 1) /ju/ is pronounced /jʊ/ before velar codas /ŋ, k̚/
 * 2) /uɪ/ is a falling diphthong [uɪ] after a consonant in an open syllable; and is a rising diphthong [wi] when it is a syllable of its own or in a closed syllable.

Positional allophones
Rangyan consonants have two principal positional allophones: initial and final. The initial form is found at the beginning of a syllable and the final form is found at the end of a syllable. All plosives [p, t, k] are unreleased [p̚, t̚, k̚] at the end of a syllable. Final [ɾ] is a liquid [l].

Phonotactics
Rangyan syllable structure is maximally CgVC, where the first C is the initial consonant; g is a semivowel glide /j/ or /w/; V is a vowel; the second C is a coda. Any consonant but /ŋ/ may occur initially, whereas only /m, n, ŋ, p, t, k, s, l/ may occur finally.

Below is the table of all syllable finals (gVC) in Rangyan.


 * 1) pronounced [wi] when it is a syllable of its own or before codas /n, t̚, s, l/; and pronounced [wɪ] before codas /ŋ, k̚/
 * 2) pronounced [uɪ] after an onset in an open syllable.

Additional finals /wam/, /wɛm/, /wap/, /wɛp/ can be found in foreign loanwords.

Vowel harmony
Traditionally, the Rangyan language has had strong vowel harmony; that is, in pre-modern Rangyan, not only did the inflectional and derivational affixes change in accordance to the main root vowel, but native words also adhered to vowel harmony. However, this rule is no longer observed strictly in modern Rangyan. In modern Rangyan, it is only applied in certain cases such as onomatopoeia and interjections.

There are three classes of vowels in Rangyan: positive, negative and neutral. The vowel classes loosely follow the vowel heights. Exchanging positive vowels with negative vowels usually creates different nuances of meaning, with positive vowels sounding fast, hot, dry, hard, solid, focused or aggressive, and negative vowels sounding slow, cold, wet, soft, insubstantial, diffuse or tranquil.

Pitch accent
Rangyan pitch accent can be presented with a two-pitch-level model. In this representation, each syllable is either high (H) or low (L) in pitch.


 * 1) If the accent is on the first syllable, then the first syllable is high-pitched and the others are low: HLL...
 * 2) If the accent is on a syllable other than the first, then the first syllable is low, the following syllables up to and including the accented one are high, and the rest are low: LHLL..., LHHLL..., LHHHLL...
 * 3) If the word does not have an accent, the first syllable is low and the others are high: LHH... This high pitch spreads to unaccented grammatical particles that attach to the end of the word, whereas these would have a low pitch when attached to an accented word.

Examples are given in the table below. The number before each pitch pattern tells you the syllable where the last high pitch is.