Blog Post · Bye bye y... hello y

Bye bye y... hello y ^

Posted On Saturday 16 November 2013 by Murray Colpman (Muzer)

OK. Very shortly after the last post, we decided to rectify this once and for all. First of all, a restatement of the problem.

* W isn't a problem because the "semi-vowel" used by timlan is far enough away from the closest actual vowel in timlan (our u) to be distinguishable relatively easily (compared to y) - see ua and uwa. Therefore, w gets to stay for now. However, remain vigilant when pronouncing ua and uwa.
* Y is a problem because the "semi-vowel" is the same as timlan i, so iya (for example) sounds the same as ia unless a glottal stop is inserted into the latter, which we didn't want to make mandatory for all words.

Therefore, we have replaced y with the OLD pronunciation of x - that is, the "the" th, or the "with" th.

This is easy to say for English speakers and removes all ambiguity of pronunciation (hopefully). Hooray!

Two words have been changed because of this:

hyorax --> horax
binahyo --> binayo