Phonology change and spelling reform

I thought my phonology was pretty much set in stone, but I can't bring myself to keep the distinction between glottal stop onset and zero onset. It's going out! And with it goes the grapheme <‘> - which I have also realized is the wrong codepoint; I've been using is U+2018 "Left single quotationmark", when I should have been using U+02BB "Modifier letter turned comma" (or ʻokina). Very embarrassing as I consider myself one to know better about such things.

But that is the past. I won't be using either. From now on the glottal stop is unmarked as it is the realization of zero onset. The name of the language will therefore be spelled Mhmmz, but the pronounciation is the same. Luckily I haven't much vocabulary, but the few words I have will no longer distinguish glottal stop and zero onset.

The spelling reform is somewhat related to this issue. As <f, k, x> can be both onset and coda of a syllable, in words of multiple syllables I wan't to be able to show when this is the case. I will use a simple apostrophe (not ʻokina, for ease of typing) where the sound is in the coda position. For example the words mxnnz will potentially be a different word from mx'nnz, and so will mkfqql and mk'fqql.

So the rule is: When you come across a intervocalic consonant cluster as many consonants as possible/allowed are read as the onset of the second syllable. Unless an apostrophe is used, in which case this is where the syllables break.

Script

I've been working on the script for quite a while and now I have finally organised my scribbles and scanned them in. First a sample, so you can get a feel of it:

The name of the language (‘Mhmmz) in the ‘Mhmmz script

The asian inspiration should be obvious, and I think that goes well with the tonal nature of the language. I have tried to mimic, mix and match (and even shamelessly stolen a bit from) scripts such as tibetan, devanagari, chinese, katakana, hiragana, hangul, tamil, mongolian and possibly many more. It is written vertically - another very asian feature - from top to bottom in rows from right to left.

Now let's break down the word into its individual parts:

Analysis of the word ‘Mhmmz

The yellow things are punctuation: The first two circumflex-like things mean "begin paragraph", and the last vertical line means "end paragraph". I know. It's a very short paragraph.

Each syllable is enclosed in a 7-shaped bracket; the green ones in the image. Or if there is no onset simply a vertical line. This is from devanagari- and tibetan-influence.

The red characters are the vowels m and mm respectively. See how the shape of the long vowel symbol is derrived from the short vowel symbol? All long vowels of the script are, but each of them is derived somewhat randomly. But I guess this makes the script featural. At least a bit like hangul.

The bright blue character is the onset of the second syllable (h), and you may wonder where the onset of the first syllable (‘) is. It is not written directly, but the horizontal line of the syllable-bracket alone stands in for it. And as mentioned no onset is marked otherwise.

The purple curl at the end marks the tone, and so does the absence of a curl in the first syllable. I think you get the point of how this script works. Now jump in to get the full alphabet.

IPA phonetic inventory

I am working on the grammar, and have found out I want to use a few different kinds of reduplication for inflexion. I am also writing a document with all the information on the language and some backstory of it.

Meanwhile, here's the phonology with extended IPA notation. It may not be accurate, and it may be more confusing than helpful, but I felt I had to put it in IPA.

Consonants:

	Nareal		Velopharyngeal		Glottal
	Unvoiced	Voiced	Unvoiced	Voiced	Unvoiced
Stop	-	-	k [pm]		‘ [m͡ʔ]
Fricative	f [m͋]	v [m̬͋]	x [ʩ̊]	g [ʩ]	h [m͡h] or [m̥]
Affricate	kf [pmm͋]	kv [bmm̬͋]	kx [pm͡ʩ̊]	kg [bm͡ʩ]	-

Vowels:

	Labial	(Labial-)Palatal	(Labial-)Uvular
Short	m [m̩]	n [m͡ɲ̩]	q [m͡ɴ̩]
Long	mm [m̩ː]	nn [m͡ɲ̩ː]	qq [m͡ɴ̩ː]

Welcome

This is the official blog of my conlang ‘Mhmmz. This will show the most up-to-date revision of the conlang.

The language has been posted in a number of places already in different forms and under slightly different names. The very earliest form is on the New CBB where it was known as either ‘mhm̋ or ‘ohaa. Here you can see some of the early development, for example it started with a one vowel system and now has three different qualities.

Then it was posted on DeviantArt (see picture below), where it was called 'M0hmm2. It is mostly a phonology as of right now, and the DeviantArt post is pretty much up-to-date. Only one change has been made to the orthography: Instead of numbers ( 0, 1, 2, 3 ) tones are marked with letters ( Ø, l, z, j ), since I found the numbers in text disturbing.

Well, that's it for now. I'll update this in a week or so, as I am going on holiday. See ya!