Dúinwoitt [ˈdɨɲ.wəθ] is a somewhat naturalistic a priori conlang that I'm working on as a side-project. My ultimate goal for this new project is to create a language aesthetically reminiscent of the British Isles and grammatically inspired by Standard Average European and the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area. As such, Dúinwoitt phonology is heavily inspired by the Celtic languages with other inspiration coming from the Germanic.

This post details the sound changes from Proto-Faeteach [ˈfeː.θɐx] to Modern Dúinwoitt and explains the origins of its system of initial consonant mutation. One quirky example of Dúinwoitt mutation is how deóir [ˈðoj] becomes a ndeóir [ɐˈɲoj]!

Overview of Proto-Faeteach phonology

The consonant inventory of Proto-Faeteach was similar to that of Proto-Celtic, except for the notable addition of *ŋ.

Proto-Faeteach vowels, on the other hand, were more reminiscent of Old English. Proto-Faeteach also had both long vowels and diphthongs, but these are analyzed as vowel-approximant sequences: *æj, *aj, *ej, *oj, *ij, *uj, *æw, *aw, *ew, *ow, *iw, and *uw.

Proto-Faeteach had a maximal syllable structure of sC^(1)S^(1)VS^(2)C^(2), where C indicates obstruents; S, sonorants (nasal, approximant, or lateral); and V, vowels. C^(1) can only be voiceless plosives *p, *t, *kʷ, and *k when in a complex onset. S^(1) can be any sonorant, except for *ŋ and *j, but can only be *r or *l when in a complex onset with C^(1) plosive. C^(2) can only be a voiceless obstruent, not including *kʷ.

Sound changes

Old Dúinwoitt

Old Dúinwoitt syllable structure was significantly simplified from Proto-Faeteach. Both onset and coda consonant clusters with sonorants were reduced, producing a set of phonemic voiceless sonorants. sC1- clusters simplified to simple onsets consisting of a voiceless plosive.

• [+son] > [+son, -voi] / #(s)C[-voi]_V and V_C[-voi]#

• C[-voi] > Ø / #SV and VS#

• s > Ø / #_C[-voi]

• C[+voi] > [-voi] / #S and S#

• l > r / C_V

Several shifts occurred in Old Dúinwoitt that resulted in the loss of labiovelar obstruents and the emergence of palatalization and velarization (ter

I know that modern Celtic languages, a long with a variety of others, feature consonant mutation in different syntactic and morphological environments. As wikipedia does not provide an explanation for this phenomenon, I was hoping an linguistics expert of some kind on this subreddit, could provide me with an answer.

Why do some languages feature consonant mutation?

I'm a conciseness freak, it's an obsession. I realised at one point that using all 26 Latin letters in any order you can create 17,576 3-letter words and 456,976 4-letter words. So... as most Latin letters are consonants, I'd have to either have a very consonant-abundant language (which I attempted but didn't like the sound of it in the end), or I could assign each letter a vowel pronuncation and a consonant pronunciation. So it looks like this:

A=/θ,a/ B=/b,œ/ C=/ɣ,ɛ/ D=/d,ɒ/ E=/ð,e/ F=/f,ʏ/ G=/g,ɛ̃/ H=/h,ɑ/ I=/ɹ,i/ J=/ʒ,ɪ/ K=/k,æ/ L=/l,ɨ/ M=/m,ɯ/ N=/n,ʊ/ O=/x,o/ P=/p,œ̃/ Q=/ŋ,ɒ̃/ R=/ɾ,ã/ S=/s,ɨ̃/ T=/t,ĩ/ U=/ɣ,u/ V=/v,ʌ/ W=/w,ʊ̃/ X=/ʃ,ø/ Y=/j,y/ Z=/z,ʏ̃/

This kind of spelling is only possible if the syllable structure is CV(C)(V) which looks good to me. Except when you start thinking about morphology.

The basic idea is to just focus on keeping the words concise, the "language" is a posteriori based on English, but only in spelling.

So for example, "guitar" would be 'gtr', pronounced /gĩɾ/. How do I render "guitarist"? Let's try 'gtrs'. Pronounced /gĩrø/, apparently, :P Now, if I always render the English suffix "-ist" as '-s', it's going to end up pronounced /s/ if it's in the 3rd position in a word.

So back to the title, is there anything natural about changing the pronunciation of vowels into consonants depending on where they are in a word?

Merhaba, I got tht consonants change when they are followed by a vowel. But I don't know when to use it? Like for example somewhere it is kitap and somewhere it is kitabı.. why not kitapı? And I'm not getting which is the original word .. Can someone kindly explain this to me? I checked various websites but couldn't understand. Teşekkür ederim :)

In Russian class II verbs, the stem of the verb will often change in the first-person singular, for example ходить (to go on foot, multidirectional), stem ход-, but 1sg. хожу.

I've begun to find patterns and regularities in how this happens, for example д often turns into ж as in this example, or that к will become ч, or bilabials tend to add л after them, etc. I don't know all the rules.

Why does this happen and what are the underlying phonetic changes? Why do the consonants mutate as they do?

My conlang employs 6 instances of consonant mutation (Elision, Eclipsis, Palatalization, Nazalisation, Aspiration and Gemination) and each one of them are triggered by certain declension and conjugation patterns.

For example, the dative case in nouns always trigger initial aspiration:

Palka (nominative, ''p'' is unaspirated) -> Phalka (dative, ''p'' is aspirated).

In the fictional history, the preposition ''yh'' was used to mark the dative case, but it dissapeared leaving the next consonant aspirated.

Is this usage of consonant mutation naturalistic? I know Celtic languages do that to some extent, but, as far as I know, they serve little to no grammatical purposes.

I want my current conlang, Tcymẃachym, to be based on some elements of the Celtic languages, specifically Welsh, and I want to incorporate some form of consonant mutation but I'm not sure if I understand it correctly. At the moment, consonant mutation can occur in five places: The first consonant of an intransitive verb, the first consonant of a noun with the genitive particle, the first consonant of a noun with a definite article, the final consonant of a verb, and the first consonant of any adjective.

The mutations look like this at the moment.

So the question is: am I doing this right? Any help will be appreciated and feel free to ask anything else about Tcymẃachym!

Edit: Celtic, not Gaelic. Says a lot about what I know about the languages, doesn't it.

Studying Welsh, and having some familiarity with Goedelic languages, I am struck by the way the mutations are conditioned not only by preceding sounds but also serve a grammatical role, following certain prepositions and reflecting, for example, who the possessor of a mutated noun is. (example: Welsh cath is the root form of English "cat," and "our cat" is ein cath, but "his cat" is ei gath, and "her cat" is ei chath).

How and when did the system of sound changes originate?

The first time mutation is even mentioned on the course is at the end of the second section and it says this:

"Remember that i causes a soft mutation of the following word."

That's it.

Fortunately, I had a bit of an idea what was happening, but anyone going into the course blind would probably be shouting "You spelled it different last time!" at their computer by now. I understand grammatical concepts can be pretty difficult to portray in an interesting or effective way with Duolingo, but I'm not sure that leaving it up to the learner to figure it out on their own (After first figuring out what they need to figure out!) is the best idea.

The Wikipedia article on Vietnamese morphology mentions that Vietnamese has consonant mutations. I was wondering if there were any resources on this, and if it's like other languages with consonant mutation (Celtic languages, Fula, etc.).

In addition, how is public education in countries that use these languages changing mutations? And how is this all reflected in the orthography of the languages?

Just as the title implies, I would just like to know if any of you could elaborate and clarify on all these consonant mutations that take place when inflecting in many Indo-European languages?

What I'm talking about is this change in the stem for example as in Latin "mittere > missum") or in French "produire" > "produisez". Czech "kniha" > "knize" and... well I'm out of examples now but I think you get the picture. I am pretty sure these examples don't have too much in common but I'm more curious in knowing if there is a term for this process/phenomenon or whatever and lastly what would trigger it.

Because even though I find it aesthetically pleasing, it just seems weird, unnecessary and overcomplicating to me somehow why you just couldn't say "mittum" or "produirez".

Although not Indo-European, another example would be from Finnish : "nähdä" (to see)> "näen" (I see)> "näkee" (s/he sees). So according to Wiktionary, this verb comes from Proto-Uralic *näke, later rended in Proto-Finnic as *nähtäk.

Okay then, so far so good, I get the correlation between "k" and "h" and how the former morphed into the latter (kinda) but why would you just screw consonants all together in "näen" when you say "näkee". The endings both start with a vowel, so why the variation?

Well I hope I'm making sense, thanks in advance!

Nonùba has a system of nasal mutation in certain consonants. Basically, under certain environments, a consonant following a nasal vowel will become nasalized. So, just as a demonstration:

> Loefi bitǫuli. [ɺóefi bitṍũɺi]
("The woman might win.")

> Watą bitǫuli. [wátã mitṍũɺi]
("The man might win.")

That spelling is less than ideal, since the rules for when it happens are a little weird and not always immediately obvious. It's always predictable, provided you know what parts of speech the words are, but I'd still like to be able to show the pronunciation of the /b/ in the morpheme as /m/ to avoid any weirdness.

The obvious solution would be to spell it just as "Watą mitǫuli", but then that would bump up against other words:

> Loefi mitǫuli. [ɺóefi mitṍũɺi]
("The woman might push.")

> Watą mitǫuli. [wátã mitṍũɺi]
("The man might push.")

So I'd need a way to be able to distinguish regular /m/ from the impostor /m/ — and the other consonants as well. The ones that undergo mutation are /b d j/ ‹b d y›, which turn into /m n ŋ/ ‹m n g›.

One idea would be just to do a diacritic, so something like ‹ḿ ń ǵ›, so "Watą ḿitǫuli" would be inambiguously with the "win" meaning, not "push". Another solution would be digraphs ‹mb nd gy›, giving "Watą mbitǫuli" — but I don't really like the aesthetic of that.

What do you guys think?

In other words, would it be enough for every verb to just memorize 1st Sg., 2nd Sg. and 3rd Pl. form because 3rd Sg., 1st Pl. and 2nd Pl. can be easily derived from the 2nd Sg?

Like if I want to learn the present forms of идти it's enough to know иду́, идёшь, иду́т because the remaining forms can be derived from идёшь by replacing -шь with -т, -м and -те. Maybe that's an obvious fact that every text box teaches you on the first page but since I'm learning by myself and with a language partner I kinda wanted to confirm that that's a save way to put verbs in my Anki :)

Hello friends! I don’t speak any Celtic languages myself (not yet!), but I do love reading about them.

Does anyone have papers or resources on what caused initial consonant mutations to develop across so many Insular Celtic languages, even though it evolved independently and in quite different ways? Yes, I understand the literal mechanic of final consonants causing assimilatory changes on the following word. However, I’m still curious why essentially all Insular Celtic languages show some variant of this phenomenon when it wasn’t inherited.

I can’t think of any set of conditions which would make this more likely to evolve. It’s unlike vowel harmony, for which I’ve heard the arguments (a language that has more vowels than necessary for distinguishing all its affixes can collapse those distinctions into simple harmony; therefore it often occurs independently in related languages). It’s just shifting the same burden of meaning to the next consonant or vowel.

So, why? Is it just an sprachbund thing (a coincidence spreading through the area)? Is it still a mystery? Or is there a nice reason? I’ll take anything you guys have.

I'm currently planning to post an intro on Goitʼa, which turns out to be a lot more difficult than I though, but for now I thought I'd post this. But here's a little bit of info on Goitʼa: It's spoken on the country/land of Goitʼa (yes country and language have the same name) in an alien world. However Goitʼas are human-like. I'm not aiming for 100% naturalism as this is mostly an artlang for a story I'm writing.

I drew inspiration from various Natlangs, mainly Hungarian, Japanese, Turkish, Celtic languages, and a few others.

This post will demonstrate the differences in pronunciation between Northern and Southern Modern Goitʼa, because, not coincidentially, one of these two was born and raised in Northern Goitʼa, and the other in Southern Goitʼa. It will also show a bit of colloquial Goitʼa, specifically when it comes to texting. Technically, Northern and Southern Goitʼa are two different accents, and they're mutually intelligible because Northerners and Southerners are always in contact, so everyone's used to each other's accent. Orthographically, they're both the same.

The one in gray is the Southern Goitʼa, and the one in blue is the Northern Goitʼa. In the IPA section there'll be two IPA transcriptions. The first one is Northern Goitʼa, and the one underneath is Southern Goitʼa. If there's only one IPA transcription, that means it's pronounced the same way in both accents. The ( ^(!!) ) next to one of the two transcriptions is to indicate how the character who sent that text would actually pronounce it if they were speaking irl.

And please do leave some feedback or opinions! I wanna hear what you guys think. Goitʼa makes sense for me in my head because my POV is the only one, so I would like to know from you guys' POV if something seems odd or doesn't make sense, or anything really (:

At the end of the post, there's a recreation of this SMS but with the native writing system.

Texts between two individuals who are *very* into one another ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

Name at the top:

Ehran

/ˈe.ɾ̥an̪/ ^(!!)

/ˈe.ʁ̥ɑn̪/

ehr-an
love-1SG.POSS

My love

Texts:

Jō!

/joː/

Yo!

Ṣas!

/ɕas/

Hey!

• Ṣas actually means 'morning', but is also used colloquially as an all-rounder greeting, so you can use it as long as it's daytime, even if it's actually 10 pm.

***Kha

I understand the choice of whether to use y/yr depends on whether a vowel sound is used.

An initial wy is tricky because sometimes it's a diphthong and sometimes the w is a consonant. This also happens with feminine words starting gwy- which lose their initial g through mutation after the definite article.

I have only seen Yr Wyddfa and not Y Wyddfa.

Despite this many native speakers insist on pronouncing the w as a consonant here after the yr, which breaks the rule and makes no sense to me.

So whether it's yr wybodaeth or y wybodaeth should depend on the pronunciation of the w in gwybodaeth.

I think pronunciation does vary for gwybodaeth and so both may be correct.

yr wylan - the seagull (w is a vowel sound here.)

yr ŵyl - the holiday (w is a vowel sound here.)

yr ŵyn - the lambs (w is a vowel sound here.)

y waith - the time, occasion (w is a consonant here.)

y wadd - the mole (w is a consonant here.)

y wal - the wall (w is a consonant here.)

What about wyneb - face?

yr wyneb or y wyneb ?

Are there any words starting with wy which you think definitely use y, not yr?

Phil

Sudden Lee

Go post NSFW jokes somewhere else. If I can't tell my kids this joke, then it is not a DAD JOKE.

If you feel it's appropriate to share NSFW jokes with your kids, that's on you. But a real, true dad joke should work for anyone's kid.

Mods... If you exist... Please, stop this madness. Rule #6 should simply not allow NSFW or (wtf) NSFL tags. Also, remember that MINORS browse this subreddit too? Why put that in rule #6, then allow NSFW???

Please consider changing rule #6. I love this sub, but the recent influx of NSFW tagged posts that get all the upvotes, just seem wrong when there are good solid DAD jokes being overlooked because of them.

Thank you,

A Dad.

So far nobody has given me a straight answer

So admittedly, when I was planning for Ciadan, I decided early on that I wanted consonant mutations to have grammatical implications (a'la Irish and Celtic languages). I didn't put too much thought into where or how this came about - in fact, I hand-waved it initially as an evolutionary idea without a lot of follow-up. But after REALLY putting some thought into my proto-langs and their evolution, I think I came up with a pretty good (non-hand-wavey) idea on where it began. Let me know your thoughts!

Ixatan

I've already did a brief explanation on Ixatan in my previous evolution post found here, so I won't give too many details. Reference back to that for its phonology.

--

Several important changes happened before the big sound change that lead to lenition as a grammatical concepts (the following happen in chronological order):

• Any nasals in a cluster with stops/fricatives assimilate to the same place of articulation as its following stop / fricative (ie. /mt/ > /nt/, /nk/ > /ŋk/)
• Vowels are dropped if the previous vowel is the same and one of following conditions are met:

1. The vowel (-V-) is word-final ((C)V(C)(C)-V-)
2. The vowel (-V-) is between single consonants (CVC^(1)-V-C^(2)(V)) AND C^(1) is of a higher/equal sonority than C^(2) or C^(1) is a stop and C^(2) is a fricative
3. The Vowel (-V-) CV(C)C^(2)-V-C^(3)CV is in the following setup and C^(3) is of a lower sonority than C^(2) (liquid > nasal > fricative > stop, from most > least sonorous)

• For all consonant clusters created as a result of the previous sound change (1 and 2 specifically), the following happens to ensure there are no illegal clusters:
  • Dual fricatives become a fricative and a stop, with the stop maintaining its place of articulation (F^(1)F^(2) > F^(1)S^(2))
    • /fθ/ > /ft/, /sf/ > /sp/, /θx/ > /θk/, etc.
  • Dual stops become a geminate of the first stop (S^(1)S^(2) > S^(1):)
  • Dual nasals drop the second nasal
  • A stop followed by a fricative switch positions:
    • /ts/ > /st/, /tf/ > /ft/, etc.
• /wa(:)/ and /ya(:)/ become /o(:)/ and /e(:)/ in stressed syllables.
• /wi/ and /ju/ become /y/ in stressed syllables
• The following diphthongs merge into monophthongs:
  • [iu] [ui] > y, [eu] [oi] > ø, [ia] > e, [ua] > o

Consonant Changes

Here, the consonantal inventory of Pre-Ciad

I am currently in the hospital. I had a back operation yesterday. The surgical nurse came in my room and started asking questions about my back. She asked me if I had any falls during the last year. I responded just one. It was after summer.

She laughed and said in 20 years of doing this she never was told that joke.

..... Will get a reward.

Because they work on many levels

Well, toucan play at that game.

Argon does not react.

Windows

Martin Freeman, and Andy Serkis.

They also play roles in Lord of the Rings.

I guess that makes them the Tolkien white guys.

She said apple-lutely

'Eye-do'

This is my first post pls don't kill me lol.

The people in the comment section is why I love this subreddit!!

Cred once again my sis wants credit lol

I'm currently working on a conlang family. Two of the three conlangs will feature initial consonant mutations, like the Celtic languages (one heavily influenced by Welsh, the other by Irish).

Do you have them in any of your conlangs and what are they?