4 Phonology of Old Shókë

4.1 Sound system

Consonants:

	Labial	Dental	Palato-alveolar	Velar
Oral Stop		t, d		k, g
Fricative		th, dh	sh, zh	x
Affricate			ch, j
Nasal Stop	m, n

The t and d are purely dental, as in Spanish.

I personally dislike f and v: their omission is plausible. The omission of p and b is implausible.

Vowels and syllabic liquids:

	Front	Back
Close	i	u
Mid	e	o
	æ
Open	a

Alveolar glide	Alveolar lateral
r	l

It is to be noted that in Old Shókë, the liquids r and l do not play a consonantal role. They function exclusively as nuclei in onset-nucleus-coda structures (below). For example, to pronounce mrm, simply utter the English word murmur (with rhotic r) but leave off the final ur.

To do: A few, but not many, of these sounds are non-English. A bit more could be done in this direction.

4.2 Phonotactics

Syllables are primarily CVC, and secondarily CV or CVCVC.

To do: formulate other restrictions as they arise.

4.3 Stress

Stress in polysyllabic words is always on the penultimate syllable. In the title of this document we write Shókë for maximum clarity to the first-time reader; for internals of this document we will simply write shoke.

Stress across words in a sentence, I have not decided yet. But since Shókë is head-final I expect stress to land naturally on the heads.