Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Syllabic Consonants and the Schwa

One last thing I guess I forgot to discuss is Syllabic Consonants.

I say Syllabic Consonant, but really I sort of mean "Consonants preceded by a schwa" (/ə/). I can't really tell the difference

In Latin script, Syllabic Consonants are distinguished by being upper case, as in lRim ("trees").

Syllabic Consonants are rarely morphemic; instead, they are a transformation of a regular Consonant caused by difficulty in pronunciation. For example: lim means "Tree" and (following normal pluralization rules) "lrim" should mean "trees." However, Elessic doesn't like having to pronounce word-initial〈lr〉, so the "r" is made syllabic. Therefore, the plural of lim is lRim.

"R" is the most common, since its use in pluralization causes it to wind up in hard-to-pronounce places.

Elessic also doesn't like "l[consonant]l." Most often, this is solved by making the second "l" syllabic. An example of this is in the word stalkLar ("death knight," a type of monster). stal means "death" and klar means "knight," but "stalklar" is difficult/unpleasant to pronounce.

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