Suffixes Contents

In Shwa, we use the term suffix to refer to the second letter of a digraph, a combination of two letters that represents a single sound. We're used to digraphs from English, where th, ch, sh and ng are all used to represent missing letters.

In Shwa, the second letter of a digraph can only be a slender letter - one with a pointy top. You've already met most of them as semivowels - we'll cover them first. As suffixes, they represent secondary articulations.

Actually, before considering the suffixes, let's discuss the sole prefix.

Prenasal Prefix

The Prenasal Prefix is used before a stop, affricate or fricative to indicate a prenasalized sound. They're very common in Africa, for instance in the name N'Djamena, the capital of Chad :

Prenasals combine a nasal with the homorganic obstruent : the prenasal prefix is pronounced like the nasal at the same place of articulation. However, they're not clusters ; they function as single consonants (most of those languages have no other consonant clusters). The difference between the Bantu word congo and the English word congo is analogous to the difference between English its and it's ; they sound the same, but in the former, the ng functions phonologically as a single letter, and the first syllable ends in o.

The Prenasal Prefix is also used to write the moraic nasal of Japanese, which also assimilates to the place of the following consonant, even when it reduces to a nasalization of the vowel.

And now, on to the suffixes :

Palatal Suffix

The semivowel y is used as a suffix to indicate a palatalized consonant, which is not the same as a palatal consonant. A consonant is palatalized when, while the consonant is being articulated elsewhere, the body of the tongue is also coming up to form a secondary articulation against the palate, as if you were saying y at the same time as you said another sound.

For instance, the Gaelic and Slavic languages show this kind of secondary palatalization. These languages contrast palatalized "soft", "slender" or "light" consonants with velarized "hard", "broad" or "dark" consonants. In Russian, which has lots of palatalized consonants and usually marks them on the following vowel, there is a special soft sign, the ь мягкий знак, to indicate that the preceding consonant is palatalized. For example, a soft t' at the end of most Russian verbs indicates the infinitive, while the hard t indicates the 3rd person singular form of the present tense :

There's no difference in Shwa between iotation (the insertion of a y sound between consonant and vowel) and palatalization. Russian sometimes adds a soft sign before a soft vowel to indicate when it needs both the suffix and the semivowel. In such cases, Shwa uses a double y:

The palatal suffix is omitted before i, on the assumption that the i always palatalizes the preceding consonant.

Velar Suffix

The yh semivowel is used as a suffix to indicate a consonant that is pronounced with secondary velarization . However, in languages like Russian and Irish that contrast velarized and palatalized consonants, the velar suffix is rarely needed, since consonants are velar by default.

Russian, Polish and some other Slavic languages don't even need the velar suffix before i, because they use the hard ih in Shwa, written as ы in the Cyrillic alphabet and y in the Latin alphabet.

Labial Suffix

The w semivowel is used as a suffix to indicate a consonant that is pronounced with the lips rounded. For example, Cantonese has sounds written kw and gw both in romanization and in Shwa, as in the name of the province 廣東 gwóngdūng :

Note that the Chinese version of the same name, 广东 guăngdōng, is also written with the w semivowel, but the w sound continues after the g as a semivowel. That's the kind of distinction that's interesting for phoneticists but not for us.

This suffix is also used for the back flat sounds of Berber.

Labiopalatal Suffix

If a consonant needs both the Palatal suffix and the Labial suffix, we use the yw semivowel as an Labiopalatal suffix:

Emphatic Suffix

Arabic features six emphatic consonants : emphatic versions of d t s dh (or z) and k, plus a special emphatic l in the word Aḷḷah. In most dialects, they are phonetically pharyngealized, which means they have a secondary pharyngeal articulation. More important, these consonants (plus r, but excluding l) have an effect on neighboring sounds.

Shwa represents this pharyngealization using the Emphatic suffix, which shares a bottom with the pharyngeal consonants, so it makes sense as the suffix for pharyngealized consonants, too. And since this feature affects neighboring vowels, the use of a suffix facilitates the mental regrouping of the suffix with the vowel : the pharyngeal suffix on the consonant becomes a pharyngeal on-glide to the vowel.

These letters are also used for the front flat sounds of Berber.

Opening Suffix

We already talked about the Opening suffix on the Vowels page, but it can also be used with consonants, if needed.

For example, isiZulu is the most spoken African language in South Africa, with about 10 million speakers. It features ejective, aspirated, and "implosive" stops (which are written with normal voiced letters). But it also features "depressor" versions of the voiced stops, which make the following vowel breathy and change its tone. Shwa writes these depressor consonants with a following Open suffix. As with emphatic consonants in Arabic, the use of a suffix here facilitates the regrouping of the suffix with the vowel as a voice- and tone-changing on-glide.

Break with Suffixes

The Break can be used to show that a following letter is not a suffix. For example, in Russian, it's used when the letter y follows a hard consonant. This is the same role played in Russian by the hard sign, the ъ твёрдый знак.

There's one more use of the Break. At the end of words (and sometimes, syllables), plosives are often not released - we swallow the release and end the word with the airflow stopped. That occurs in many languages, sometimes predictably and sometimes not, but almost never contrastively; that is, it never matters whether you release the stop or not, and so we don't show it in the writing system.

But some languages - for instance Hamer, an Ethiopian language - are claimed to contrast released and unreleased stops at the end of words. If this is true (and I'm skeptical), the Shwa would use the Break to indicate that the final stop is released; the normal unreleased variant remains unmarked.

Recap

Here are all the slender letters :

Ligatures

Some fonts combine suffixes (but not other slender letters) with the preceding letters to form a new letter, called a ligature. That's especially true in fonts for languages like Russian or Arabic that have a whole series of letters with the same suffix. We used to have ligatures in English, too, and most of you have seen the glyphs æ and œ at some point; they represent the combinations ae and oe as one letter. In many fonts, the letters ff and fi are also ligatures: they're written connected.

Unlike normal Shwa letters with a top and a bottom, Shwa ligatures have three shapes: a top, middle (the old bottom) and a new bottom consisting of the bottom of the suffix. The top of the suffix is always pointy, so we don't need to include that. In the 1D form, the suffix is usually a separate letter. But in the 2D form, the three shapes of a ligature are all squeezed into the same space as a normal letter.

There are two tricks :