Calenyena Dictionary Help #lexember

[aldersprig]

Okay, I've been cheating nicely by going to dictionary entries for words that sound the same as my morphemes and that was working fine... except that I can't think of any palatalized consonants to look up to get the sounds like dyaik in odyaikaar. Help?

Comments

[inventrix]

I think I found one?

"An example of palatalization in English is the pronunciation of did you? as [dɪdʒuː] rather than [dɪdjuː]"

[inventrix]

Also apparently in some dialects the pronunciation of "dew" uses a palatalized d so you might want to look into that

[inventrix]

Finding an example of "dya" specifically wouldn't work for English words because we only palatalize things before front vowels and neither of your a sounds are front vowels. You can probably find something in Russian by looking in a dictionary under the palatalized D letter

[aldersprig]

What's a front vowel?

[thnidu]

Front and back vowels are so called by the highest part of the tongue. You can see standard chart at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vowel.

Example words in English with front vowels: beat, bit, bait, bet, bat. (The "bait" vowel in English is really a diphthong. I think French "café", the é, is a better match.)

[thnidu]

The combination /ju/, as in "you", can have the effect of palatalizing the preceding consonant. In grade school we called that sound "long u"; I don't know What do they teach them in those schools nowadays?

In most American dialects (but not in most British) this fails to apply to /t/ and /d/, after which we usually either don't have a "y" sound at all (duty "dooty", tune "toon", nude "nood") or go beyond palatalization ([skipping the rest of the jargon] fortune "FOR-chun", procedure "pro-SEE-jer", sure "shoor", azure "AZH-er"). But for the others there are common AmE examples:

(labial consonants)
pure
beauty
few
view
mural

(velars)
cute
argue

(glottal)
huge

I don't remember the Calenyena phoneme list offhand and I should be doing other stuff right now, but I hope this helps.