Pnar (Ka Ktien Pnar), also known as Jaiñtia, part of the Khasi language is an Austroasiatic language spoken in India and Bangladesh.
Phonology
Pnar has 30 phonemes: 7 vowels and 23 consonants. Other sounds listed below are phonetic realizations.[3]
Vowels[edit]
| Front | Central | Back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Close | /i/ | [ɨ] | /u/ |
| Near-close | [ɪ] | [ʊ] | |
| Close-mid | /e/ | /o/ | |
| Mid | [ə] | ||
| Open-mid | /ɛ/ | [ʌ] | /ɔ/ |
| Open | /ɑ/ |
Consonants
| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | /m/ | /n/ | /ɲ/ | /ŋ/ | |||
| Plosive | voiceless | /p/ | /t̪/ | /t/ | /tʃ/ | /k/ | /ʔ/ |
| voiced | /b/ | /d̪/ | /d/ | /dʒ/ | |||
| voiceless aspirated | /pʰ/ | /t̪ʰ/ | [tʃʰ] | /kʰ/ | |||
| voiced aspirated | [bʱ] | [d̪ʱ] | [dʒʱ] | ||||
| Fricative | /s/ | /h/ | |||||
| Trill | /r/ | ||||||
| Approximant | central | /w/ | /j/ | ||||
| Lateral | /l/ | ||||||
Syllable structure
Syllables in Pnar can consist of a single nucleic vowel. Maximally, they can include a complex onset of two consonants, a diphthong nucleus, and a coda consonant. A second type of syllable contains a syllabic nasal/trill/lateral immediately following the onset consonant. This syllabic consonant behaves as the rhyme. (Ring, 2012: 141–2)