Pandunia's phonology

Alphabet

Pandunia's alphabet consists of 19 consonants, 2 semiconsonants and 5 vowels.

a b c d e f g h i j J k l m n ŋ o p r s t u v z

Pandunia is written only with lower-case letters. The upper-case letters are not used (except <J>) and therefore there are no capitalization rules to be memorized.

In case the proper symbols are not available for typing, <ŋ> can be replaced with <q> and <J> with <J>. In practice the dotless j symbol (J) is almost always unavailable on computers because it doesn't belong to the Unicode standard yet.

Phoneme Inventory

Consonants

Pandunia has the following consonants:

Letter Phonetic range English equivalent
b [b] [b̥] bin
p [p] [pʰ] pin
d [d] [d̥] duck
t [t] [tʰ] tuck
g [g] [g̊] gill
k [k] [kʰ] kill
h [h] [x] hot or loch
l [l] long
m [m] milk
n [n] neon
ŋ [ŋ] long
f [f] [ɸ] fit
r [r] [ɹ] [ɻ] [ʀ] [ʁ] roar
s [s] sissy
z [z] zoo
c [ʃ] [ɕ] [ʂ] machine
J [ʒ] [ʑ] [dʒ] azure or juice

Semiconsonants (semivowels)

Letter Phonetic range English equivalent
j [j] [ʝ] [i̯] hallelujah
v [v] [ʋ] [w] [u̯] vet or wet

Vowels

Pandunia has 5 vowels.

Letter Phonetic range English equivalent
a [a] father
e [e] bet
i [i] beat
o [o] note
u [u] rude

Word shape

The permitted syllable shape is (C)V(C), where C stands for a consonant, V for a vowel and parentheses mark an optional element. However some internationally well known words may have a more complex shape if their recognizability requires that.