more amiu - little rowboat

[pauraque_bk]

At lolaraincoat's request:



nello "little rowboat"

The written form is transparent: It's a boat with an oar on the water, and a small circle to represent the "little" inflection.

n as in no
e as in pet
l as in look -- it's geminated here, pronounced like a double consonant in Italian
o like the vowel in caught (in those dialects which distinguish caught from cot)

The whole word should be said in a low, even tone.

I took this opportunity to settle some things about the way the size inflections work, since they were a bit vague before. This is a good example, because it demonstrates one of the main features of Amíu inflection: Regular vowel mutation.

There are twelve vowels in Amíu, six tense and six lax (for the purposes of vowel mutation, anyway -- if you count the low-pitched vowels, there are twenty-four altogether).

Tense series:

back				front
high	ú		ý		í
		ó		é
low			á

Lax series:

back				front
high	u		y		i
		o		e
low			a

The "little" inflection does two things:

1) Adds a suffix (-final consonant + first vowel if the word ends in a consonant, or -j + first vowel if the word ends in a vowel). So in nol "rowboat", the suffix is -lo.

2) Moves the first vowel closer to the front of the mouth. Pitch and tenseness stay the same. The movement is one "notch" over, thuswise:



So in nol "rowboat", o becomes e, giving us nello "little rowboat".

Vowel shifts like this are common throughout Amíu inflection, moving forward, back, up, or down. The "big" inflection is just like the "little" one, except that it shifts the first vowel back instead of forward, giving us nullo "big rowboat".

The u in nullo is pronounced as in "put".

Next up, "linguist" for ellen_fremedon. Any questions, anything you'd like to see written, explained, or iconized, just let me know.

[Edited because I can't count.]

Comments

Oooooooh! Pretty!

[lolaraincoat.livejournal.com]

Wow! thank you! So cool! So beautiful! Um ... is it okay if I use it as an icon? Don't want to just grab the beautiful shiny thing without asking. Well, actually, I do want to grab it. But I am restraining myself, because of being so civilized and all.

Re: Oooooooh! Pretty!

[pauraque]

Go on, grab the shiny. *g*

I like this one too -- the other ones I wrote very carefully, but this one I just scribbled in the course of figuring it out, and it happened to come out looking cool.