Pronunciation - Consonants
Sentiment
In Chílanoth, many words have several different pronunciations depending on the sentiment .
Sentiment (dúáloc) allows for nuance of expression in spoken language.
The two sentiment types are:
Impersonal Language (náian dú)
Personal Language (lónúan dú)
Impersonal Language is the "standard Chílanoth" and creates an expression that is neutral.
Personal Language is used to add extra 'warmth' to a statement, or for emphasis.
Impersonal Language uses hard consonants.
Personal Language uses soft consonants.
One may mix and match sentiment freely, but different circles (eTra) speak different dialects and will gravitate towards using hard/soft consonants for different words.
The letters affected are:
d - d
th - T
f - f
t - t
r - r
hard | medium | soft | |
|---|---|---|---|
d | d | d͡ʒ | |
T | ð | θ | |
f | f | ɸ | |
t | t | t͡s | |
r | r | ɾ | ʒ |
"r" is the only letter in Chílanoth that have 3 levels of hardness. The hardest being /r/ and the softest being /ʒ/. In some cases, however, only hard r can be used.
The letter C
The letter C may be pronounced either as /ɕ/ or /ʃ/ depending on the dialect and word.
Exceptions
When "s" (s̄) appears in the middle of a word it is always pronounced like /ɕ/ or /ʃ/.
r is always pronunced /r/ and not /ɾ/ or /ʒ/ when:
at end of word
when followed by ð, θ, ɕ, ʃ, ɧ, ʧ or d͡ʒ
When r is followed by l it will either be pronounced like /r/ or /ʒ/, never /ɾ/.
When n is followed by a g it will be pronounced like /ŋ/ (together they are pronounced /ŋg/).
Certain words only has informal speech style, such as "da" ("da") or "den" ("den") or "do" ("do") which can only be pronounced with a hard "d".