The
phonemes of Atong are given in
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) in Table 1. That table also presents how the phonemes are written in the Atong alphabet used for everyday writing by people who are not linguists. As we can see in the table, the glottal stop can be written with either a bullet or an apostrophe. The bullet was used by missionaries to write the glottal stop in Garo when the writing system for that language was created in the 1800s. The apostrophe has since been adopted to write the glottal stop as it is available on all computer keyboards. The vowel phoneme is written in the
orthography, as it is in
Khasi and
Welsh. It was the Welsh Presbyterians that developed the Khasi writing system and used the letter to write the phoneme in Khasi. The
consonant phoneme has
aspirated and non-aspirated pronunciations [sʰ ~ s]. The aspirated
allophone , occurs at the beginning of a
syllable, while the unaspirated occurs the end of a syllable. Both phonemes are written with the letter . Aspirated also occurs in other Asian languages such as
Burmese and
Korean.
Glottalization Glottalization in Atong is a feature that operates on the level of the syllable, and that manifests itself as a glottal stop at the end of the syllable. Glottalization only affects open syllables and syllables ending in a continuant or a vowel. In the following examples, glottalized syllables are indicated by a following bullet. The pronunciation is given between square brackets where the symbol represents the glottal stop and the full stop represents the syllable boundary. In the examples below, the following abbreviations are used: COS 'change of state', CUST 'customary aspect', INCOM 'incompletive aspect', NEG 'negative', If the glottalized continuant is followed by a consonant, the glottalized phoneme is not released, i.e. ''man' -khu-cha'' (be.able-INCOM-NEG)'is not yet possible'. If the glottalized continuant is followed by a vowel, it is released and the release repeats the continuant so that it can be said to act like the onset of the following syllable, e.g. ''man' -ok'' (be.able-COS) 'was able'. In a glottalized syllable with final the glottal stop usually precedes the oral closure of the when followed by another vowel, e.g. ''mel' -a'' (be.fat-CUST)'is fat'. This phenomenon also happens, but less frequently, with syllables ending in , e.g. ''nom' -a'' (be.soft-CUST) 'is soft'.
Vowels Atong has six
vowel qualities occurring in the native vocabulary as well as in
loanwords: . In addition, there are four long vowels which are only found in loanwords from English and Indic languages. These are usually pronounced longer than the indigenous vowels: /iː/ , /eː/ , /aː/ and /oː/ . In the orthography, long vowels are represented by double letters. Note that /uː/ and /əː/ are not attested. Examples of
minimal pairs and near minimal pairs are given in the table below. The difference between the loan and the indigenous words is a matter of vowel quality. In closed syllables, where Atong vowels would be pronounced lowered and more retracted, the loan vowels will have the same quality as the Atong vowels in open syllables. Not all loan words that have long vowels in the source language have long vowels in Atong, and not all loans that can be pronounced with a long vowel in Atong have a long vowel in the source language.
Syllable structure The canonical syllable structure of Atong is (C)V(C), where C stands for any consonant and V for any vowel. This structure can be maintained if words like
mai 'rice',
askui 'star' and
chokhoi 'fishing basket' are analysed as containing a vowel and a final glide (see
glide (linguistics)). The glide, presented by the letter i, is the coda of the syllable rather than an element of the nucleus. In phonemic writing the words would look like this: /maj/, /askuj/, /t͡ɕokʰoj/. There are two glides in the language: /w/ and /j/. The glide /w/ occurs in both syllable initial and syllable final position, e.g.
wak 'pig' and
saw 'rotten, fermented' respectively. The glide /j/ occurs only syllable finally, e.g.
tyi /təj/ 'water'. Traditional words with the structure CVVC do not exist, e.g. *
gaut or *
main (where the asterisk [*] indicates the non-existence of these words). If a
diphthong is defined as
two vowels that can occur in the nucleus of a syllable, then Atong has no diphthongs. There are words that are written with two adjacent vowel
graphemes or letters, e.g.
mai 'rice',
askui 'star', and
chokhoi 'fishing basket'. However, the letter
i in these words represents a consonant phoneme, viz. the off glide /j/ (see Table 1). The writing system uses the letter
i in this way because the letters
j and
y are both used to represent other phonemes. == Examples ==