Phonology & writing system
of gjâ-zym-byn (gzb)

This presentation is somewhat linguistically technical; for a non-technical (but somewhat outdated) presentation see "Lesson 0".

The writing system is phonemic. In email messages and in the plain text pages of this site, I use an ASCII transcription which is a superset of x-convention Esperanto. My handwriting for gzb however has evolved into something that no longer so much resembles the Esperanto alphabet. Perhaps when I get a scanner I'll put up a sample.

In ASCII, a letter followed by 'x' or 'q' is a digraph; for instance, {sx} represents the postalveolar fricative in English "shoe" and {iq} represents the lax front vowel in English "lip". In Unicode, used in all the HTML pages of this site, these letters are {ŝ} and {ĭ}. Generally an 'x' digraph in the ASCII transcription corresponds to what was a circumflexed letter in my original handwritten orthography, and a 'q' digraph in the ASCII transcription corresponds to what was a hacek'd letter in my original handwritten orthography. However, not all of these characters are available in Unicode, so I've used the closest fits I could find.

Phoneme inventory

Whenever in the tables below two letters appear paired like {t/d}, the first is unvoiced and the second voiced.

Stop consonants / fĭ-θy kě'pâ-baw

Fricative consonants / šî'fy-baw

Nasal consonants / nĭm-baw

Liquid consonants / ler-baw

Clicks & ejective / Ќ-ƥ-baw

Front vowels:

Central vowels:

Back vowels:

All the vowels have nasal and oral variants. A nasal vowel is indicated by a following {ň}, as in such minimal pairs as {zuň} (alive) vs. {zu} (only), {bâ} (zero) vs. {bâň} (permission).

Semivowels, approximants:

Many diphthongs occur - almost all the possible combinations of the vowels and approximants above. Keep {âw} and {aw} distinct. The first is the semivowel in English "how" or Esperanto "aŭ", conventionally transcribed /aʊ/ though it's typically pronounced as /æʊ/. For the second, /ɑʊ/, I am not aware of any natural language equivalent. A particular tongue-twister is the postposition {rřr}, /ɾɹ̣ɹ/ "from far beyond".

Nonphonemic letters:

There is an unwritten glottal stop between adjacent vowels, as in {mĭ-i}, "about", and {vâ-oŋ-zô}, "to eat". That is, all syllables in gzb begin with a consonant, and the glottal stop appears initially only in the postpositions {i, o, ř} when they have no directional prefix.

Vowel harmony

By vowel harmony if any syllable of a word is nasalized, they all are, as are any following clitics. So {ň} appears only at the end of a root word (or conjunction), never in suffixes or clitics. In other words, nasality is allophonic, not phonemic, for the vowels that only occur in clitics and suffixes. If a compound radical is formed of a root with a nasal vowel and one with an oral vowel, all vowels in the compound are nasal. This can theoretically cause homophony; for instance, the (fairly contrived) compounds {tâ-zuň} (sibling-alive) and {tâň-zu} (taking-only.one) would be pronounced identically as /'tæ̃.zũ/.

Nasal vowels are rare in the lexicon (occurring in 22 root words out of 784 as of 2005/12/5), though they are not uncommon in running text because they occur in a few common morphemes such as {zuň} "alive", {ryň} "do, act", {θuň} "story, narrative", and {kiň} "and".

Miscellaneous notes on allophony

When a morpheme beginning with an affricate follows a morpheme that ends with a nasal consonant, the affricate is lenited into the corresponding plain fricative. e.g., {tyn-ca} "to situate oneself" is usually pronounced /'tʊn.sɑ/, rather than /'tʊn.t͜sɑ/. This also causes occasional homophony; for instance, {râm-źa} (cat-AUG = mountain lion) and {râm-za} (cat-ADJ = relating to cats) are both pronounced /'ræm.zɑ/.

An initial cluster of semivowels tends to be coarticulated, as in {rjâ} "quest" or {wrym} "decoration".

Consonants that are followed immediately by rounded vowels |u|, |o|, |î|, and |ô| tend to be slightly labialized.

The distinction between |u| /u/ and |y| /ʊ/ tends to be neutralized when they occur before |w| /w/.

Phonotactics

gjâ-zym-byn has very restrictive phonotactic constraints compared to English, German, Esperanto, etc., but comparatively liberal constraints compared with Japanese, Hawai'ian, Konya, etc.

Normally only a click or vowel can form a syllable nucleus. However, foreign names can have syllabic lateral or nasal consonants, and in general are subject to much looser phonotactic constraints than native words.

Generally speaking, the form of a syllable is

C(S)V(S)(S|N)

where C = any consonant except a click or ejective, S = semivowel/approximant (|r|, |l|, |j|, |w|), V = vowel, N = nasal consonant (|m|, |n|, |ŋ|). But this is a simplification; not all initial consonants can be followed by an approximant, and some can be followed only by a limited subset of approximants. Not all approximants can cluster with each other syllable-finally. Nasal vowels (in root words) cannot be followed by a nasal consonant, whether or not an approximant intervenes.

The following consonants may be followed by any approximant:

|k|, |g|, |t|, |d|, |p|, |b|, |s|, |z|, |θ|, |ð|, |f|, |v|, |c|, |ź|

The following consonants may be followed only by |r|, |l|, or |w|:

The following consonants may be followed only by |r|, |l|, or |j|:

|₣|, |ƴ|

The following consonants may be followed only by |r| or |l|:

|ĉ|, |ĝ|

These consonants cannot be followed by any approximant:

|Φ|, |ķ|, |j|, |č|, |ž|

In addition, |h| can only be followed by |w|.

Samples of syllable types: (C = any consonant except a click or ejective, K = click or ejective, S = semivowel/approximant, V = vowel, N = nasal consonant)

The vowel in a syllable indicates the type of word it occurs in:

E.g.: {fî'suň}, "Earth"; {ruŋ}, "going, movement"

Nonsegmental phonology

Stress & intonation aren't phonemic. I haven't quite figured out what the stress and intonation rules are yet, but getting them wrong won't make a word mean something different (as in Chinese) or turn a statement into a question (as in English). The schwa {ě} is never stressed, and tense vowels are more likely to be stressed than lax vowels.

Writing

My earliest handwritten alphabet used a circumflex for the letters represented with an x-digraph and a caron or hácek for the letters represented with a q-digraph. Later on these letters mutated as in rapid writing I merged the accent mark and the letter into a single glyph. More recently (late 2006/early 2007) I've started creating logographic glyphs to represent some of the most common words and morphemes, based on a corpus frequency analysis. I started with the most common morpheme, the verb suffix {-zô}, and after getting used to the new glyph for it, started working my way down the frequency table, and getting used to using one new logogram before making a new one. I'll put up samples later when I have an opportunity to borrow a friend's scanner.

I gradually worked out this Unicode mapping over the last few months (late 2004-early 2005). I'm still not entirely satisfied with it, though. In July 2005 John Quijada suggested some possible improvements (e.g. replacing î with ü) which, on consideration, seemed like too much work to implement.

There are no capital letters. Proper names are indicated to be such by suffixes.

Acronyms may be pronounced by inserting {ě} (schwa) after the first and medial consonants, {u} after the last, with stress on the last syllable.

Punctuation

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Last updated March 2007

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