To represent special sinal phonemes, we use traditional digraphs, i.e. romanized digraphs used by sinalistic scholars.
Consonants
| Labials | Dentals | Velars |
|---|---|---|---|
Plosives | p b pj bj | t d tj dj | k g kj gj |
Fricatives | | | h hj |
Nasals | m | n | |
Liquids | | r rj | |
There was a distinction between normal and palatalized consonants (palatalized consonants being represented by a following j). For plosives, another distinction was made between voiced and unvoiced consonants.
Vowels
| front | central | back |
|---|---|---|---|
high | i | | u |
middle high | e (closed e) | | o (closed o) |
middle low | ä (open e) | | oo (opened o) |
low | | a | |
extra low | | aa (dark a) | |
Stress
The stress in SIN was always on the first syllable of a word, even in words with reduplicated first syllable. Apart from that, each odd syllable had a secondary stress. This pattern played an important role during the reduction of the unstressed vowels and the evolution from to Modern Medzor.
Phonotactics
The syllable structure of Sinal was (C)V(C). The coda was only allowed at the end of the word, so that the words had the structure (C)VCVC...V(C).
Repair strategy
Even though Sinal was mainly an isolating language, there were a few morphological and derivational processes which required the existence of a repair strategy: Consonants clusters were avoided by dropping the fist consonant at the seem, and vocal hiatus were avoided by dropping the second vowel.
Examples:
*gedar (open) + *karjaan (body) > *gedakarjaan (hurt, injure) > MM stem džetkaln *etjek (walk) + *gjärjaa (sun) > *etjegjärjaa (day) > MM stem ežel *akjä (animal, creature) + *arjaam (forest) > *akjärjaam (forest animal) > MM stem ažlá