Mahal phonology

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Mahal phonology is the study of the inventory and patterns of the consonants, vowels, and prosody of the Mahal language.

[edit] Consonants and vowels

The phonemic inventory of Mahal consists of 29 consonants and 10 vowels. Like other modern Indo-Aryan languages the Mahal phonemic inventory shows an opposition of long and short vowels, of dental and retroflex consonants as well as single and geminate consonants.

**Vowels**
	Front		Central		Back
	Short	Long	Short	Long	Short	Long
Close	i	iː			u	uː
Mid	e	eː			o	oː
Open			a	aː

**Consonants**
		Labial	Dental	Alveolar	Retroflex	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Plosive	voiceless	p	t		ʈ	c	k
	voiced	b	d		ɖ	ɟ	g
	prenasalized	^mb	ⁿd		^ɳɖ		^ŋg
Fricative	voiceless	f		s	ʂ	ɕ		h
Fricative	voiced	v	z
Nasal		m		n	ɳ	ɲ	ŋ
Approximant			l̪	l	ɭ	j
Rhotic				r

Dental and retroflex stops are contrastive in Mahal. For example: maḍun means ‘quietly’ madun means ‘seldom’. The segments /t/ and /d/ are articulated just behind the front teeth. Mahal retroflex segments /ʈ/, /ɖ/, /ʂ/, and /ɭ/ are produced at the very rear part of the alveolar ridge.

Mahal has the prenasalized stops /^mb/, /ⁿd/, /^ɳɖ/, and /^ŋg/. These segments occur only intervocalically: /haⁿdu/ ('moon' /ha ('uncooked rice') and /a^ŋga/ ('mouth'). Mahal and Sinhalese are the only Indo-Arian languages that have prenasalized stops.

The influence of other languages has played a great role in Mahal phonology. For example the phoneme /z/ comes entirely from foreign influence^{[citation needed]}: /gaːziː/ ('judge') is from Persian, /maːziː/ ('past') is from Urdu.

The phoneme /p/ also occurs only in borrowed words in Modern Standard Mahal: /ripoːtu/ ('report'). At one point, Mahal did not have the phoneme /f/, and /p/ occurred in the language without contrastive aspiration. Some time in the 1600s, word initial and intervocalic /p/ changed to /f/. Historical documents from the 11th century, for example, show 'five' rendered as /pas/ whereas today it is pronounced /fas/.

In standard Mahal when the phoneme /s/ occurs in the final position of a word it changes to [h] intervocalically when inflected. For example /bas/ ('word' or 'language') becomes /bahek/ ('a word' or 'a language') and /mas/ ('fish') becomes /mahek/ ('a fish'). /s/ and /h/ still contrastive, though: initially/hi^ŋgaː/ ('operating') and /si^ŋgaː/ ('lion') and intervocalically /aharu/ ('year') and /asaru/ ('effect').

/r/ a voiceless alveolar flap or trill is peculiar to Mahal among the Indo-Aryan languages. But some people pronounce it as [ʂ] a retroflex grooved fricative.

[edit] Borrowed phonemes

Modern Standard Mahal has borrowed many phonemes from Arabic. These phonemes are used exclusively in loan words from Arabic, for example, the phoneme /x/ in words such as /xaːdim/ ('male servant'). The following table shows the phonemes that have been borrowed from Arabic/Persian together with their transliteration into Tāna.

Tāna	Arabic / Persian	SAMT	IPA
ޙ	ح	ḥ	/ħ/
ޚ	خ	x	/x/
ޜ	ژ	ʒ	/ʒ/
ޢ	ع	‘	/ʔ/
ޣ	غ	ġ	/ɣ/
ޥ	و	w	/w/
ޛ	ذ	ź	/ð/
ޠ	ط	ţ	/tˁ/
ޡ	ظ	ẓ	/zˁ/
ޘ	ث	ṡ	/θ/
ޤ	ق	q	/q/
ޞ	ص	ş	/sˁ/
ޟ	ض	ḑ	/dˁ/

[edit] Phonotactics

Native Mahal words do not allow initial consonant clusters; the syllable structure is (C)V(C) (i.e. one vowel with the option of a consonant in the onset and/or coda). This affects the introduction of loanwords, such as /is.kuːl/ From English school.