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I've had an idea for Hombraian vowels degenerating so far as to become only three phonemes /a i u/, though [e o] still exist in the diphthongs /ji wu/ [je wo]. The representation of /a i u/ as |a e o| might look a bit too much like Oro Mpaa. It does make a modicum of sense though, since in a first step, only the unstressed [e i] and [o u] merged. The evolution of stressed /e o/ into [je wo] could be Russian influence. I wanted to have more of that in Hombraian anyway. Here's the new file: www.cinga.ch/langmaking/homlang3v.txt The old version is still available. I don't know whether I'm not going to keep it and discard the newfangled stuff. www.cinga.ch/langmaking/hombraian.txt BTW, I chose the name "Hombraia" purely for sound aesthetic reasons. Can anyone come up with a good excuse for calling a stellar nation in a sci-fi setting that way? The nation stemmed from the colonization effort of an international organization on Earth, which recruited most of its settlers from Latin America, Russia and China. Since organizations have a certain artistic licence when it comes to names, it could be a combabulation of Spanish "hombre" with a Russian adjective ending... in fact, -aio/-aia could have been a Russian-inspired productive adjective ending in the proto- Hombraian Spanish slang. "Hombraia" should mean "of the people" rather than "manly", though. It so happens the original colonizing organization was sympathizing with socialistic ideas quite a lot. -- Christian Thalmann