Phonetics, Part 2

Step 7: Vowels

On the other hand, having  6 vowels is quite reasonable. On this, I decided to take the really lazy way which makes things easy to type, which is probably fine because I haven’t used this particular set of vowels in any of my other experiments:

• a  –  /a/  (“ah”)
• e  –  /e/ or /ɛ/  (“eh”)
• i  –  /i/  (“ee”)
• o  –  /o/ or /ɔ/ (“oh”)
• u  –  /u/  (“oo”)
• y  –  /y/  (“ee” except with lips rounded, like “oh” or “oo”)

When working things in my head or on paper, one doesn’t need to worry about typing issues. While I could have just spelled some vowels with two-letter combinations, I don’t yet know if Eljan will be using dipthongs (two-sound “blends”, usually 2 vowels, as opposed to a single sound which is sort of partway between things) and don’t want to limit my options at this point. Or I could have used otherwise unused consonant letters, but spelling things something like “xljcn” looks rather strange. (Accent and/or diacritic marks don’t count. I’m using an American keyboard, so that would be no easier to type than phonetics symbols.)

Step 8: Syllable Structure

Long story short, I eventually decided on this pattern for most of the words:

[C1]-V-[C3]  or  [C1]-V-C2-V-[C3]  or  [C1]-V-C2-V-C2-V-[C3]  or  [C1]-V-C2-V-C2-V-C2-V-[C3]

• Where V is any vowel (also any dipthong if it ends up using those),
• C1 is any consonant but is more often a stop, but is quite often not present (hence the brackets)
• C2 is a consonant which is not a plosive stop, and quite often not a nasal stop either. If it’s not a nasal stop (that is, one of the non-nasal sonorants) then it usually flows from one syllable to the next, without clearly being the beginning or end of either. If it is a nasal stop, then it ends a syllable.
• C3 is a stop consonant, either kind. It’s not always present either but more commonly so than C1.

This kind of pattern, combined with all the consonants being voiced by default, might end up sounding rather sing-songy most of the time. Well, why not?

Step 9: Tonal or Atonal

Hey, do you know what would make it even more of a sing-songy language? Make it a tonal one! Plus that’s more exotic too. That would be absolutely perfect for…

……

No, wait, I can’t distinguish tones. Like, at all. People tell me I normally talk like a robot with a slightly odd accent. I might be able to figure out a half-decent way to design a tonal language anyway, but then after the next few posts I’d probably have to go on a 3 or 4 month hiatus to figure things out. So atonal it is by default.