Phonology
This page gives a basic overview of Mirja's phonology. See the referenced pages for more detailed descriptions of individual phenomena.
Segmental phoneme inventory
Mirja has the following segmental phonemes.
Consonants
Sounds in brackets appear only as the result of phonological or morphophonemic processes, and do not appear in the underlying representation of any morphemes.
| Bilabial | Labiodental | Apical | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Obstruent | Voiceless stop | (h)[n 1] | t | k | |||
| Voiceless fricative | [ɸ~w̥] | [f] | s [θ] | x | h | ||
| Voiced | v | d~ð | g~ɣ | ||||
| Nasal | m | n | [ŋ] | ||||
| Liquid | Lateral | l ɬ | |||||
| Rhotic | ɾ ɾ̥ | ||||||
| Approximant | w [ɸ~w̥] | j [j̥~ç] | |||||
- ↑ Underlyingly /p/, but surfaces as [h] in isolation
There are three processes that can change one consonant into another. The most straightforward is a dissimilation process with /s/: the second of two consecutive syllables with /s/ will replace the /s/ with /θ/:
su-s
3sg-TOP
va-t
do.it-PAST
'They did it'
The second is a merger process when two sufficiently similar consonants come together. Usually, when two consonants come together underlyingly, the result is either gemination (if they're identical) or the insertion of an epenthetic vowel between them (if they're different). However, certain pairs of different consonants merge into a geminate when they come together. In the table below, these otherwise unexpected mergers are given in bold. (Expected geminates are non-bold, and epenthetically separated pairs are indicated by '--'.)
| Second phoneme → | t | l | n | k |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First phoneme ↓ | ||||
| t | tt | ll | nn | -- |
| l | ll | ll | nn | -- |
| n | nn | ll | nn | ŋŋ |
An example of this is given below.
don-l
drink-NEG
'didn't drink'
TODO: when three come together (e.g. don-l-t)
The third and most significant process that transmutes phonemes is topicalisation. Mirja's basic topic marker is a feature bundle that docks to the final consonant of a word and transforms it into a voiceless continuant:
no-rV-*
1sg-OBL-TOP
karu
is.visible
'I see it'
Vowels
| Front | Non-front | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Unrounded | Rounded | ||
| High | i | ɨ | u |
| Low | e | a | o |