Luá - Sounds

Sounds

Consonants:

fh	like an English "f" pronounced with only the lips; a voiceless bilabial fricative
h	as in English "home"
rh	sounds like "r" and "h" pronounced simultaneously; an aspirated voiceless retroflex approximant
r	pronounced with the tongue curled backwards - sounds like some pronunciations of the English "r"; a voiced retroflex approximant
l	as in English "lake"
n	as in English "nut"
m	as in English "moon"

Vowels:

u	as in English "hula" with more lip rounding; a rounded high back tense vowel
o	as in English "or"; a rounded mid back lax vowel
a	as in English "father"; an unrounded low back vowel
e	as in English "there"; an unrounded low-mid front tense vowel
i	as in English "machine"; an unrounded high front tense vowel

Each word contains two vowels. If the vowels are the same, they are pronounced as a single long vowel (two morae). If the vowels are different, they are pronounced with the first sound gliding into the second, with the two sounds having equal vowel length (one mora each).

A single word cannot contain both rounded and unrounded vowels. The rounded vowels are "u" and "o," the unrounded vowels are "e" and "i," and "a" is considered neutral. These are all of the possible vowel combinations: uu, uo, ua, ou, oo, oa, au, ao, aa, ae, ai, ea, ee, ei, ia, ie, and ii.

Tones:

Luá is a tone language; changing the pitch pattern of a word results in a different meaning. There are six tones, classified by pitch height and contour. The three pitch heights are low, mid, and high. The two contours are rising and falling. The musical range of the six tones falls within the first four notes of a minor scale - whichever key is most comfortable for the speaker. Using the scale of D minor for the sake of explanation, low range would be D to E, mid would be E to F, and high would be F to G. Each word has two syllables, and each syllable is a note. A word in the low rising tone would be "sung" D-E. A low falling tone word would be E-D. Similarly, mid rising would be E-F, mid falling would be F-E, high rising would be F-G, and high falling would be G-F.

For readers familiar with Y. R. Chao's numerical notation for lexical tones, the six tones would be represented as follows in Chao's system: low rising 12, low falling 21, mid rising 23, mid falling 32, high rising 34, high falling 43.

When Luá is transcribed using the Latin alphabet, tone is indicated as a diacritical mark on each word. The acute accent (ó) represents high pitch, the circumflex accent (ô) mid pitch, and the grave accent (ň) low pitch. If the accent is on the first vowel it is a falling tone; if it is on the second vowel it is a rising tone. Using the vowels oo as an example, the six tones would be represented as follows: high rising (oó), high falling (óo), mid rising (oô), mid falling (ôo), low rising (oň), and low falling (ňo).

To hear what Luá sounds like, listen to the audio samples in the Luá translation from The Babel Text.