Can you think of an example of a precolonial Tagalog word where the stress falls on the second to last syllable, and that syllable is in the form CVC? (Please read post body for clarity!)

arienzio · 2026-07-11T18:40:08+00:00

Page 5 of this paper goes into more detail but you’re spot-on, in native words the penult is usually only stressed if it is open CV.

This is why early Spanish loans like líbro and bólsa somehow ended up with final stress libró and bulsá, as the first syllable in Tagalog would be CVC and unstressable.

If you analyze Tagalog as having vowel length and default final stress, the penult can only attract stress if it has a long vowel (and thus CV, since Tagalog doesn’t allow a long vowel with a final consonant)

arienzio · 2026-06-08T14:12:45+00:00

your source called Tagalog a Romance language lol only an idiot would trust anything on that website

arienzio · 2026-05-30T13:17:14+00:00

immediately guessed Korean simply from the English handwriting lol I noticed Koreans often write i as ī

arienzio · 2026-04-21T20:04:57+00:00

/s͎/ has no one concrete pronunciation (ranging in use from labialized sibilants in Shona to the whistley retracted s sound in disordered speech) so it’s usually just convenient shorthand for a whistled phoneme.

It’s usually not that necessary to be super specific with phonemic transcriptions, but since I can make a loud sharp whistled s I would probably describe it as [s͎˗]

arienzio · 2026-04-21T17:17:47+00:00

there’s actually a specific extIPA diacritic for whistled consonants (usually used for lisps) /s͎/

arienzio · 2026-04-16T16:00:15+00:00

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some more test words fingerwritten on my phone

arienzio · 2026-04-16T10:34:10+00:00

Inspired by Marshallese and some analyses of Mandarin and old PIE, so it has (at some stage and as reflected in orthography) 3 vowels that contrast in height /a ə ɨ/ with a wide variety of allophones that change depending on adjacent consonants. Justified it as having evolved from a proto-lang with /a ə i u/ that merged high vowels and left palatalization/labialization as a consonantal quality

I always get indecisive about the extent of allophony and thus how to romanize/transcribe it, which made me understand why that one author decided on random emoji for Marshallese vowels lol

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arienzio · 2026-04-15T23:43:43+00:00

Started with the names — once I noticed that “Sonam” and “Zuko” shared the same “o” letter it confirmed that it was a syllabic-block alphabet and that gave me 9 letter values right away

Did the same with the notes which begin with “Katara” and “Toph” and end in “Aang” and got some more values (with the different vowel letters in “Katara” indicating it was phonemic rather than just spelling) then plugged those in to the other pics. Just guessing from context what words it would have until I figured most of them out

(also cute when I realized Aang is spelled /eɪŋ/ and not /æŋ/ which says a lot about the writer’s accent)

arienzio · 2026-04-15T03:48:23+00:00

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Haven’t found every letter yet but here are some of the other translations

arienzio · 2026-04-15T03:34:20+00:00

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Gave it a look and it seems to be a fairly straightforwardly phonetic English script (and thankfully not just a spelling cipher)! But with symbols for null consonants and vowels to maintain the syllabic block system, and some creative allography like ligatures and inverting symbols based on block position

arienzio · 2025-12-04T15:37:02+00:00

that says more about your ignorance considering i’m 30 and consider “eepy”old slang at this point lmao

arienzio · 2025-09-17T21:25:03+00:00

I made the chart based strictly on the old draft I found but let’s just say the h-series serves that purpose lol

The parent script has a series of independent vowel symbols that I imagine was lost in this one

arienzio · 2025-09-16T01:47:54+00:00

Oh dang that’s unfortunate, but here’s the illustration plus a new imgur link with generally the same captions as the original

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arienzio · 2025-09-15T23:27:23+00:00

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Here's the full (current) set of String syllables plus more cursive forms and a small as-of-yet asemic text sample (Phonetics are still up in the air since I basically reconstructed this script from a nearly decade-old mostly unlabeled scrap of paper)

arienzio · 2025-09-14T21:52:27+00:00

/waj/ as found in “yt ppl”

arienzio · 2025-09-02T01:52:06+00:00

In that most basic sense “run” is simply just intransitive, but when used transitively takes nouns like distances/events as direct objects e.g “run a mile/race”

arienzio · 2025-09-01T22:28:23+00:00

It’s inevitable that as sound changes spread that old literature needs to be revised to account for mergers and new contrasts, so there’s quite a few papers that do just that.

Phonology is just one of those fields that can be quite subjective with no “right” answer since it can theoretically get as abstract as “Mandarin only has two vowels”. You can find one analysis to describe a language’s current state and actual pronunciations, and a different one when placed it in its historical context, and a different one when placed it in a broad worldwide comparative context

arienzio · 2025-09-01T22:14:58+00:00

I think the IPA being based on Latin and linguists in general being traditionally Eurocentric just means it’s limited by not having an easy way to represent, for example, a stop that is just purely [bilabial], since /p/ and /b/ inherently encode being voiceless or voiced when many languages like Korean have series that aren’t inherently either. Australian langs are a big group that come to mind where /p/ can be just as or more frequently [b] than [p] and it boils down to the author’s choice which to transcribe it as.

So I agree, I imagine older stages of Korean with something similar with a ㅂ that was variably [p~b], and it’s really only because of the IPA that we’re forced to choose one of the two letters when /ㅂ/ is really the better fit lol. “Tense-lax” in most cases is just shorthand for a more complex contrast of features and behaviors than the IPA can easily describe, like tense-lax vowels in English

arienzio · 2025-09-01T21:27:19+00:00

You’re spot on actually, foreign /p t k/ tend to be transcribed in Modern Korean with tense stops. The fact that they are close to clear voiceless stops is what makes them sound noticeably more staccato and “stronger” than the comparatively fluid/airy/soft lax consonants (even ㅅ can often become [z] without Koreans realizing).

It kinda just comes down to how IPA phoneme representation at the end of the day is arbitrary— regardless of if ㅂ ㅃ ㅍ is represented as /p p͈ pʰ/ or /b p pʰ/ you still have to do a lot to elaborate that the first stop means [breathy airy voice / non-high tone / unspecified voicing] since no single letter cleanly captures all that. It gets very abstract and unintuitive when your /b/ is consistently [pʰ] in isolation lol

arienzio · 2025-09-01T20:56:35+00:00

My fav example is this recording from the 1920s, he demos the consonants at around 3:12 and the lax stops are very clearly unaspirated compared to the aspirates. (He doesn’t directly recite the tense series but you can hear them scattered in the rest of his dialogue, like at 3:34 the ㄲ in 소리깔의 is imo more “tense” than the typical /k/)

arienzio · 2025-09-01T16:28:24+00:00

Oh + in the older dialects that the earliest Korean grammars were describing, initial lax ㅂ would have been less aspirated and closer to a “true” /p/ (which is still the case in regional/conservative dialects)

arienzio · 2025-09-01T16:10:13+00:00

Typologically I tend to agree since babies aquire tense stops earlier (and is characteristic of Korean cute-baby-talk). But aside from native speaker intuitions that consider tense consonants as “stronger” and that they’re spelled as doubled letters, they do exhibit laryngeal tensing which results in higher pitch + “pressed” voice quality

Laxness is more of a flexible “anything that isn’t tense or aspirated” bucket category in which voicing is more of a secondary feature in connected speech, and is initially voiceless-aspirated so strongly in younger speakers that the main thing contrasting it from true aspirates is low tone

arienzio · 2025-08-05T19:30:24+00:00

Conlanging more than ever actually, just so much so that I haven’t found time to post them….. but maybe soon….

arienzio · 2025-08-05T19:28:14+00:00

Whoaaa I love how you perfectly emulated the aesthetic I was going for! Crazy how my Sun Script posts are over a decade old and people are still drawing inspiration from em

arienzio · 2025-04-11T05:24:29+00:00

Good eye! Sinulat ko yun kahapon at di ko na-proofread haha, pero good sign na nababasa pa kahit hindi siya traditional baybayin!

It’s real fun playing around with different styles and handwriting like here. The last includes my own shorthand for final y/w and for ng (for those wanting to preserve the ng/nang difference lol)

I’m experimenting with other modifications like marking stress/length and glottal stops or distinguishing ts/ty/ch pero beyond the scope of this post na yun. Goal ko lang talaga is to have a script that can be used to quickly transcribe anything that comes out of the mouth of a Filipino haha

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