Follow
here to report that my conlang has sufficiently progressed to the stage of having words whose gender* cannot be determined from their shape and which may be the opposite of what one expects
* grammatical gender in the sense of having two morphological classes of word**; conlang does not feature natural gender
** it’s not really gender but rather vowel harmony that has gone thru some shit
which is to say, i found /zʕɪ/ hard to say
(the problem wasn’t actually /zʕ/ per se but rather that it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish from /ʑʕ/; merging the two allows me to force /ʑj/ in all cases while keeping /zʕ/ before low vowels)
this due to X (/ʕ/~/χ/) lowering the following vowels and Y (/j/~/ç/) raising them, which also resulted in the two merging to a single medial with as many as FOUR different pronunciations depending on the surrounding sounds