418
« on: February 25, 2015, 12:03:45 pm »
I took it more as "base is lax, circumflex is tense." Umlauts are still "half-vowels," i.e. unrelated sounds:
i = [ɪ]
î = [i]
ï = [ɨ]
u = [ʊ]
û = [u]
o = [ɔ]
ô = [o]
ö = [ɤ]
a = [ä]
â = [a]
ä = [æ]
å = [ɑ]
e = [ɛ]
ê = [e]
ë = [ø]It still wraps around the chart, but the sounds are more understandable to English speakers, which I assume is our main audience. Tense and lax aren't qualities listed on that vowel chart, but they do exist (sort of), and maybe that's just how the Dwarves see things.
As for acutes and graves, I've been playing with the idea that they palatalize the consonant either before (grave) or after (acute) them: basically, whichever way the high end of the accent is pointing, that consonant gets palatalized (or, if the vowel is word-initial, it adds a [j] before the vowel). The vowel itself is the same as the base vowel. This also cuts our vowel count down to a more manageable fifteen.
Of some note is the fact that, in the attested corpus (i.e. the RAW language files), the circumflex, umlaut, and ring accents all appear ~30 times, whereas the acute and grave accents appear ~15 times each. This suggests that they are just different variations of the same vowel (or rather sub-vowel... so they're like variants of a variant...) instead of two widely-separated sounds.
On schwas: there's always the possibility that vowels in unstressed syllables will weaken to schwas or other sounds. So they're not phonemic, but could easily be allophonic. Depends how deep into things like word stress you want to go.
