V phonology

The sound system of Nognese reminded our scouts of Italian. They nicknamed it 'V' because of its open syllables.

Vowels
V has five vowel phonemes that resolve to seven surface vowels. It has some diphthongs, but they're fairly transparent.


 * /a/ => [a]
 * /e/ => [ɛ] when stressed; [e] otherwise
 * /i/ => [i]
 * /o/ => [ɔ] when stressed; [o] otherwise
 * /u/ => [u]

Consonants
Geminates are present, represented in scouts' Latin orthography with double letters.

The /k/ phoneme tends to palatalize to [tʃ] before front vowels /e/ and /i/.

Some dialects have [ʙ] as an allophone of /br/, or [ʈ:] and [ɖ:] as allophones of /rt/ and /rd/.

Accent
Accent is fairly but not always predictable, and not always marked in the standard orthography. Most words with a diphthong are accented on the diphthong. Most words with a geminate consonant are accented on the syllable preceding the geminate. Otherwise, there appears to be a primary accent on the penult, with a secondary accent on the first syllable.

Sound changes
Compared to the protolanguage, V has lost glottal stops, simplified some consonant clusters to geminates, and reduced velar fricatives to null. This can be seen especially with V words and their C cognates.