Entlan
Clicks: ǂʼAmkoe has a large number of click sounds, which are produced by a variety of mechanisms (e.g., dental, lateral, and postalveolar clicks). The clicks are classified as:
Dental clicks /ǀ/ (like the sound of the tongue clicking against the teeth)
Lateral clicks /ǁ/ (tongue clicks made at the side of the mouth)
Postalveolar clicks /ǃ/ (similar to the sound made when imitating a "tsk tsk")
Stops and Fricatives: The language also has other consonants like stops and fricatives that occur at various places of articulation, including glottal, bilabial, and velar.
Nasal consonants like /m/ and /n/ are also present.
Voicing and Aspiration: Many consonants are voiced or voiceless, and some may be aspirated (produced with an additional breath of air).
ǂʼAmkoe has a relatively simple vowel system. There are five basic vowels /i/, /e/, /a/, /o/, and /u/, with some distinctions between short and long vowels.
Like many African languages, ǂʼAmkoe is a tonal language. Tone is phonemic, meaning that the pitch or tone of a word can change its meaning. There are high, low, and rising tones in ǂʼAmkoe.
Syllables in ǂʼAmkoe can have a CVC structure (consonant-vowel-consonant), and the clicks typically appear in the onset position of a syllable. Clicks can occur as initial sounds, medial sounds, or in other positions depending on the word.
Consonants: Silbo Gomero is a whistled form of the Gomero language, primarily used for communication across long distances in the valleys of La Gomera, one of the Canary Islands. The whistled form preserves the phonetic system of Gomero but simplifies the articulation. It primarily reflects the consonants and vowels of Gomero.
Stops: /p, t, k/ (voiceless), /b, d, g/ (voiced).
Fricatives: Whistles imitate the fricative sounds of the language, such as /s/, /f/, and /ʃ/ (sh).
Nasals: Nasal consonants like /m, n/ are present but typically realized as simplified whistled sounds.
Liquids: /l, r/ are still recognizable in the whistled form.
Glides: /w, j/ can be approximated through pitch modulation.
Vowels: Silbo maintains the basic vowel system of Gomero:
/i, e, a, o, u/ (as in the original Gomero language).
The pitch and tone used in Silbo whistling can convey the same meanings as vowels in the spoken language.
Phonotactics: Silbo operates within the phonotactic rules of Gomero, which follow a CV (consonant-vowel) structure, but Silbo often simplifies consonant clusters to facilitate whistling.
Tone: Silbo does not inherently have tone in the same way as tonal languages like Mandarin or Thai, but it relies heavily on pitch variation to convey distinctions in meaning, with different pitch levels representing different vowels and sometimes different consonant sounds.
Stress: The stress patterns of Silbo are directly tied to those of Gomero, where stress typically falls on the penultimate syllable.
Elven
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