Chamteela/Part 1

The Chamteela language is written using a purely phonemic orthography, meaning that all of the words can be pronounced as they are written. In English, the word tear has two different pronunciations depending on the context, but all Chamteela words exactly match their spelling. As a result, it would be impossible to perform a spelling bee in Chamteela.

Vowels
The following table shows the pronunciation of the Chamteela vowels. The bolded vowel letter (or letters) in the English words on the right column matches the Chamteela pronunciation of the corresponding vowel sound on the left.

Consonants
Except for the following exceptions listed below, all of the consonants in Chamteela (along with the digraph ch) are pronounced identically to how they are English, but without any aspiration.

Aspiration is the puff of air that is pronounced in English when pronouncing the letters ch, k, t, and p in certain contexts. To give you an idea of what aspiration is, place your fingers in front of your mouth while saying the English words pin and spin. You will notice that you will release a puff of air at the beginning of pin, but not at the beginning of spin. This puff of air is aspiration. Now try pronouncing the word pin without releasing any air. Try it again with chin, tin, and kin. Once you have got that down, you will be able to correctly pronounce Chamteela words.

Here are all of the exceptions to the Chamteela consonants in terms of how they are pronounced:

Syllable Structure and Stress
Chamteela words divide their syllables similarly to English, with vowel-initial syllables occurring only at the beginning of words or after another vowel. All other syllables begin with a consonant.

By default, Chamteela words are stressed on the first syllable after the possessive prefix (which is discussed later on in this Wikibook) if one exists in that word. The word Chamteela, for instance, is stressed on the second syllable since cham- is a possessive prefix. However, words that do not meet this general rule of thumb are stressed on the syllable with an accent mark on the vowel.

For example, the words polóv (good) and koyóowut (whale) are stressed on their second syllables; stressed long vowels are written with the accent mark only on the first letter of the long vowel.

If there is only one consonant between a stressed and an unstressed vowel, then the consonant is pronounced as both the final consonant in the stressed syllable and as the first consonant in the unstressed syllable, unless it is one of the following consonants that are pronounced differently than they are spelled in this context. In the following table, the hyphen represents the normally unwritten syllable break, the capital letter S stands for the stressed vowel, and the capital letter U stands for the unstressed vowel.

Typing Chamteela
Any mobile or nonmobile keyboard that can type Spanish and has the dollar sign symbol can also type Chamteela. If you would like to type in Chamteela, research a Spanish language keyboard layout with a dollar sign symbol that works right for you.