Talk:Tsrul

Its very peculiar that your language has no velar consonants, especially since it has a large consonant inventory and includes a series of uvular consonants. This seems quite unnaturalistic to me. Your vowel system is also a bit strange because it has a close-mid and an open-mid front vowel but has neither an open-mid, mid or close-mid back vowel. Perhaps reconsider your phonology if you want it to appear naturalistic. But on the whole good job :)

John S.


 * Well, saying that a lack of a velar series is unnatural depends a lot on what one views as 'natural,' to be honest. If you ask a person who only knows Khoisan languages whether or not clicks are a natural language sound, they'll tell you that, of course, they obviously are. But if you ask...really anyone else, they aren't. Of course, that doesn't mean that this particular case is any more or less natural, especially since Tsrul contains consonant series on both sides of the velar series. But if you're looking for a specific justification for this, I actually do have one. Tsrul is a member of the Bwatsrul-Dasheth language family, and I've been brainstorming the Shether language (a sister language to Tsrul) for some time now. Shether, as well as proto-Bwatsrul-Washeth, contain both velars and uvulars. Tsrul lost the distinction after the velar sounds shifted to be considered phonemically uvular. Also, when Tsrul ṅ, q, g, or x occur before i, ĭ, e, or ĕ, they are pronounced as their velar counterparts. But they are, to Tsrul ears, allophones to the uvulars. That was stated overtly in the phonotactics section, but I'll include it in the consonants section just to eliminate the confusion. And on the subject of the vowels, in the original write-up for Tsrul, [ə] was instead [ʌ], but I changed it at some point for no particular reason. I was under the impression that the two sounds were fairly similar, but going by the audio pronunciations on wikipedia, the sound that I'd imagined for Tsrul ŭ is actually much closer to [ʌ] than to [ə]. So I'll be changing the official documentation to equate ŭ with [ʌ], and I thank you for bringing up the topic. my intentions with Tsrul have been to make it as natural as possible for some time now, and I appreciate the constructive criticism.


 * - Zankapfel 04:24, June 18, 2012 (UTC)