Sounds
The consonants, in with their orthography, are:
| Bilabial | Labiodental | Apico-dental | Postalveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosives | p | t | ṭ | k | |||
| Fricatives | f | s | h | ||||
| Liquids | w | l | y | ||||
| Nasal | m | n | ñ | ŋ | |||
| Trills | r |
The vowels are: a, e, i, o, u, ɛ, ɩ, ɔ, ʋ. Nasalization (only on a, e, o) and length are both contrastive, and diphthongs can be formed. Tone is phonemic; each vowel must carry high or low tone.
Read more about this topic: Gula Iro Language
Famous quotes containing the word sounds:
“I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words Orpheus, Linus, Musæus,—those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcæus, Stesichorus, Menander. They lived not in vain. We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“For sounds in winter nights, and often in winter days, I heard the forlorn but melodious note of a hooting owl indefinitely far; such a sound as the frozen earth would yield if struck with a suitable plectrum, the very lingua vernacula of Walden Wood, and quite familiar to me at last, though I never saw the bird while it was making it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I’m not the man to baulk at a low smell,
I’m not the man to insist on asphodel.
This sounds like a He-fellow, don’t you think?
It sounds like that. I belch, I bawl, I drink.”
—Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964)