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Weird stuff

Gilbertese.

10 consonants (which 3 are velarized bilabials) and 10 vowels (usual a, e, i, o, u stuff, long and short)

"Thank you" in Kiribati (Gilbertese) sounds like a shortening of Irish "go raibh maith agat".

Kiribati: /ko ɾapβˠa/
Irish: /go ɾˠɛvʲ/

Coincidence? Or Irish conspiracy? You decide.

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[bɹ̠ˤʷɪs.təɫ]
Nōn quālibet inīqua cupiditāte illectus hōc agō.
[tiː.mɔ.tʉɥs god.lɐf hɑwk]

That means the languages are obviously related and must belong to the Kelto-Kiribatian macrofamily!

*faints*

I'm much more interested in the Celtic side, so you work on the Kiribati side.

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[bɹ̠ˤʷɪs.təɫ]
Nōn quālibet inīqua cupiditāte illectus hōc agō.
[tiː.mɔ.tʉɥs god.lɐf hɑwk]

Are you certain? I was made to understand that Irish orthography was reformed to remove as many silent letters as possible.
I would have read this as [go reβ mei̯‿ɐ.gət̪]

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I speak English and a touch of Gàidhlig.
I am creating a conworld, which I refer to as the Carrion Series, that will contain three languages, Iriex, Dvoen and Maxna.

No, it's still a fucked up orthography, but more streamlined than 100+ years ago, I believe.

I am certain of the pronunciation though.

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[bɹ̠ˤʷɪs.təɫ]
Nōn quālibet inīqua cupiditāte illectus hōc agō.
[tiː.mɔ.tʉɥs god.lɐf hɑwk]

Is it not /ko ɾapˠa/ [ko ɾɑpˠɑ]? Should the fricative be there?

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constructedlanguages.net

The spelling is <ko rabwa>, <w> is /βˠ/.

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[bɹ̠ˤʷɪs.təɫ]
Nōn quālibet inīqua cupiditāte illectus hōc agō.
[tiː.mɔ.tʉɥs god.lɐf hɑwk]

Huh, there you go. It just seems odd for Gaelic orthography to be more transparent than Irish.

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I speak English and a touch of Gàidhlig.
I am creating a conworld, which I refer to as the Carrion Series, that will contain three languages, Iriex, Dvoen and Maxna.

But isn't <bw> /pˠ/ ?

The only consonant clusters that are allowed in Gilbertese are, AFAIK, nasal+C. Never a stop + fricative.

<bwa> may also be spelt <b'a>, as in this tutorial.

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constructedlanguages.net

Oh, I must have gotten something confused then.

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[bɹ̠ˤʷɪs.təɫ]
Nōn quālibet inīqua cupiditāte illectus hōc agō.
[tiː.mɔ.tʉɥs god.lɐf hɑwk]

Omie's phonology is pretty funky.

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"Wait for the starvation of glaciers, chicken hamburger Noel Weber Arthur."

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I'm looking at the pdf now, and it doesn't seem that strange. I think most of the apparent weirdness comes from phonemes with a wide variety of phonetic realizations being "assigned" phonemic defaults that look weird on the surface. For example, the language has /dz\/, but no voiceless equivalent. But if you scroll down you see that /s/ stands in for [s, S, ts, and tS]. In other words, the voiced and voiceless pairs exist phonetically, but depending on how you assign the phonemes, it might look otherwise. Another example is /pp\/, which looks odd since there's no /p/ by itself. But if you pay attention you'll see that /pp\/ is just a slightly aberrant pronunciation of /p_h/, which matches the group /k_h/ and /t_h/.

I think the Wikipedia page only lists the monographs (how the letters are pronounced in isolation).

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constructedlanguages.net

This is awesome. I was just looking at Australian languages on Wikipedia, and apparently the Enindhilyagwa language has 5 noun classes: human male, non-human male, female... and inanimate lustrous, and inanimate non-lustrous.

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death to vowels
/ / / /

My favourite when it comes to noun-classes is the Andi language (spoken somewhere in the Caucasus), which has a separate noun-class for insects. (I think it's like "men - women - animals - things - insects", or something like that.)

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constructedlanguages.net

The closest I've gotten was Walloon and if you count extinct languages-Aeqian. Even Gothic is more well-known.

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Áá Āā Ää Åå Ææ Ðđ Ēē Ĕĕ Éé Ëë Əə H́h́ Īī İi Iı Íí Ïï Łł Ññ Öö Øø Ōō Ŏŏ Óó Œœ Ŕŕ Śś Ŧŧ Üü Ūū Úú V̄v̄ Ÿÿ Źź Ξ Φ Ϙ Ϻ

That's how you know you don't want to live there.


edit: It is like some northern Swedish varieties which has separate words for small annoying, flying things.

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When scientists in the future speak of our life-time they will say that most of the things, ideas that was possible for us to invent was never invented in our life-time because we hadn't yet invented the words to describe the components.

English has a word for that, too: bug. Or do those Swedish dialects have even more words for different varieties of annoying flying things? I can think of multiple kinds of bugs that might need separate generic words -- bugs that make a lot of noise, bugs that circulate around lights, bugs that bang into walls and make that gross tapping sound, bugs that somehow turn up in your house even in the winter...

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death to vowels
/ / / /