Appendix:Engála pronunciation

Engála Language Navigation: Home, Phonology, Grammar, Vocabulary, Orthography

The Engála language has 23 consonants, 8 vowels, and 2 glides.

Standard Romanization

Letter	IPA	English example	Notes
a	a, æ	father, cat	Pronounced [æ] when stressed and the product of a historic monophthong.
b	b	bog
ch	tʃ	watch
d	d	dog
e	e	bait
f	f	food
g	g	good
gh	ɣ	—	Approximately like the r in French rouge.
h	h	ham
i	i	machine
j	dʒ	judge
k	k	skill
kh	x	loch (Scottish English)
l	l	left
ly	ʎ	million
m	m	man
n	n	no
ng	ŋ	sing	Can occur at the beginning of a word.
ny	ɲ	onion
o	o	coat
p	p	span
s	s	see
sh	ʃ	sheep
t	t	stop
u	u	rude
v	v	voice
w	w	wet
y	j	yawn
z	z	zoo
zh	ʒ	azure

Notes:

• Stress: Stress is marked with an acute accent on the vowel of the stressed syllable in polysyllabic words when the stress is not word-initial.

Phonetics

Consonants

		Labial	Coronal	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal		m	n	ny [ɲ]	ng [ŋ]
Plosive	voiceless	p	t	ch [tʃ]	k
	voiced	b	d	j [dʒ]	g
Fricative	voiceless	f	s	sh [ʃ]	kh [x]	h
	voiced	v	z	zh [ʒ]	gh [ɣ]
Lateral			l	ly [ʎ]
Approximant		w		y [j]

Vowels

Engála has 6 phonetically distinct monophthongs:

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid	e		o
Open	a [æ]	a

Diphthongs

There are two diphthongs: ai and au.

Phonotactics

Here are some key points about phonotactics in Engála:

• The maximal syllable structure is (C)V(C). In the proto-stage, the only allowable codas were s and n, which appears to be largely true for the modern stage as well, not considering geminates.
• Geminate consonants are rare, but allowed.
• Vowels raise before nasal codas, at least historically if not synchronically.
• Stress is lexical and somewhat unpredictable, but is often word-initial, or on the first syllable of the root if there are prefixes present (such as with plural forms of nouns).