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.[1]

Spelling	Pronunciation
a	father
aa	father (but pronounced for a longer period of time)
aaa	father (but pronounced for a longer period of time than aa)
e	bet
ee	a sound with no English equivalent pronounced halfway between bet and beet for the same amount of time as beet
eee	a sound with no English equivalent pronounced halfway between bet and beet (but for a longer amount of time than beet or Chamteela ee)
i	bit
ii	beet
iii	beet (but pronounced for a longer period of time than ii)
o	bought
oo	bought (but pronounced for a longer period of time)
ooo	bought (but pronounced for an even longer period of time than oo)
u	hook
uu	boot
uuu	boot (but pronounced for a longer period of time than uu)

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:

Spelling	Pronunciation
'	Like the sound in between the two vowels of uh-oh
kw	Like English keep, but with the lips rounded as if pronouncing the letter w
q	Like English keep, but pronounced in the back of the mouth
qw	Like English keep, but pronounced in the back of the mouth and the lips rounded as if pronouncing the letter w
r	Like Spanish perro at the beginning of words and like Spanish por favor in other contexts
$/s̸	Like English sip but with the tip of the tongue placed behind the back of the upper front teeth, creating a whistling/vibrating like sound; this letter can be spelled using both a dollar sign and the letter s with a slash through it, but this book will exclusively use the dollar sign because it is easier to type and is supported by almost all fonts
th	Like English the, not like English math
x	Like the Scots word loch or the German surname Bach
xw	Like the Scots word loch or the German surname Bach, but with the lips rounded as if pronouncing the letter w

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.

Spelling	Pronunciation
SchU	S'-chU
SkwU	S'-kwU
SqwU	S'-qwU
SngU	Sng-'U
SthU	Sth-'U
SvU	Sv-'U
SxU	Sx-'U

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.