Cloŋ Episode I: Phonolog

There are no vowels,

consntents :

b as in bEEt

fh as in fURRy

vocabulary :

there are no words it's that simple

so now you can speak the language fluently

phonotactics no geminates

spoken sample :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLHqpjW3aDs

On my journey to create a speaking language and eventually writing system for a story of mine, but I couldn’t figure out what sounds to pick for my phonetic inventory, any advice for how to pick proper/realistic sounds?

Joke conlangs out!

1 - s͜sums͜sⱥk [ʃumʃå̤k] has very symetrical vowel inventory. so symetrical that they even have unvoiced vowels (pretty unique amongst every cloŋ I've encountered) and they're: i [i], ɨ [i̤̊], u [u], ʉ [ṳ̊], e [ə], ɇ [ə̤̊], a [a], ⱥ [å̤], o [ɑ], ø [ɑ̤̊]

2 - Sygxt [ʂɪɢꭓʧ̠̝] (AKA super klingon) spunds even more harsh with labiodental m, ng, nqg, ch, dzh, q, qg, th, dh, sh, zh, hebrew h, french r, american r, wh, non-labial w, vw (bilabial approximant), voiced and voiceless bilabial trills, rr, velar trill, tshl & dzhl (voiced and voiceless retroflex lateral fricatives), velar l, jw (labialized j), palato-velar plosives and fricatives, ang glottal stop
additionally they don't have any "a sound", they only have rounded i, o-umlaut sound, unrounded u, english i sound, english oo sound, close oe sound, schwa, and unrounded o

3 - but no matter how weird sygxt was with its superharsh sound inventory, nothing can beat
Fik L̛oʈɂꜵhrq̛y [ɸyq ɺ̥ɤʈ͡ꞎʔɒɦᶉɴ̥ʉ], althrough it's not joke conlang, it's used in joke conworld... and was designed to have exactly 0 common sounds with emperatorish (with fail, since fik have /j/). and it's sounds are (listing the very weirdest): m̥, ɳ̊, ɳ, ɹ̝̊, ɹ̝, ʋ̥, ʋ, ⱱ̥, ⱱ, {palatal trills}, c͡ʎ̝̊, ɟ͡ʎ̝, k͡ʟ̝̊, ɡ͡ʟ̝, ɧ, ɧ̬ (damn, voiced "sj-sound"); ɞ~ɒ & ɤ (the vowel that is still unpronunciable for me)

Anyone from Koyikode, Kannur, and Kasrod? What are the general phonological shifts from standard Malayalam?

initial v -> b [vandi to bandi, vaa to baa, venda to benda, valiettan to baliettan]

zh -> y, g [azhikkara->Ayikkara, vazhudi ->bayidi or bagudi, vazhi to baiyi, kozhappam to koyipam]

These are some changes that I can recall on the top of my head. Are there more shifts in consonants? Also what are some major vowel shifts. Sorry if this topic is a little bit too dry.

Is this naturalistic, especially for blobfishes?

Plosives: /p pʼ ᵐp b ₍b̥₎ ᵐb b͡p b͡pʼ ʔ/

Nasals: /m̥ ₍m̥₎ m/

Fricative: /ɸ β h h̃ ɦ/

Approximant: /ʍ ʍ̬ w̥ w/

Trill: /ʙ̥ ʙ/

Implosive: /ɓ̥ ɓ ᵐɓ/

₍◌̥₎ is partially voiced (b is partially voiced because of orthography), b͡p is prevoiced, and ʍ is voiceless fricative, w is voiced approximant.

What do you think?

Hello, everyone! This is the start of what I hope to become my first complete conlang. Let me know what you all think, and if you have any suggestions on how I can improve!

Consonants

Vowels

Stress falls on the second syllable

Phonotactics

• Obstruents cannot cluster with eachother
• Labial obstruents and /t/ cannot cluster with velars
• /m/ and /n/ cannot cluster with /x/
• /ɾ/ and /n/ cannot cluster
• /m/ and /n/ cannot cluster
• /l/ and /m/ + /l/ and /n/ cannot cluster
• /s/ and /n/ cannot cluster

Allophony

• /ɨ/ triggers palatalisation; [c] [ʃ] [ɲ] [ɹ] are allophones of /t/ /k/ /n/ and /ɾ/
• /ŋ/ only appears when /n/ is followed by a velar sound

Here's an example phrase:
Se tol cunes pytar

/sɛ tɔl kunɛs pɨcaɾ/
1SG be walk.PERF. yesterday
I was walking

(Verb system in development)

Sèu is meant to be a naturalistic language but I still have some doubts and questions about the current phonology’s naturalism, which I will ask as I explain the phonology itself, questions will be indicated with a quote and sometimes extra info will be added below the question to add more context.

If there’s anything else I didn’t ask about that comes off as unnaturalistic, please tell me about it and how I can change it.

Consonants and Vowels

/ɯ/ is actually more centralised [ɯ̽]

Phonotactics

Syllable Structure: (C)(G)V

G here means the glides, /j/ and /w/, but having this as a slot in the syllable can be disputed as /j/ can only occur if C is a bilabial consonant, and even then it’s often realised as a palatalised consonant rather than a consonant-glide sequence, i.e. /pj/ would actually be [pʲ]. The same goes for /w/, where it’s often realised as labialisation on the preceding consonant, though it cannot occur after palatals.

> Should I just say that the language has palatalised bilabials and labialised consonants and just have the syllable structure as (C)V? Is this type of labialisation even naturalistic to begin with?

> I can’t help but feel iffy about the labialisation. I mainly added it in just cause it sounds nicer to me than a consonant + w sequence, I could just as easily have the obstruents de-voice it and have more /w̥/s if it would ruin my goal of naturalism however.

Only palatals and bilabials can precede /i/, with the bilabials being palatalised.

Primary stress is always on the second syllable of a word, and the first syllable of a word always receives secondary stress.

> Is fixed second syllable stress well attested? I know that WALS has a map on this and some languages do feature it but I’d just like to make sure.

Unaspirated stops, unaspirated affricates and fricatives become voiced when in between two resonants.

/ɯ/ isn’t allowed to proceed bilabial consonants as it rounds to /u/ in said environment, and /ɑ̃/ also undergoes this change, rounding to [ɒ̃] when next to bilabial consonants.

Liaison and Sandhi

When nasal vowels appear word-finally and

From what I've observed, both of these languages share several similarities between the two of them. To what extent do these phonological similarities go, both in terms of consonants and vowels?

Hello everyone. I've been working on this (still unnamed) conlang and its descendants on and off for the past year or so, with the intention of making them as naturalistic as possible. I decided now was as good a time as any to take a break from working on syntax and reflect on/share a bit of what I've actually built so far, and also maybe to get some feedback. So, I figured I'd start by sharing the ur-language's phonology as it stands currently, as well as related aspects like phonotactics and the romanization system. Anyway, here you go, and feel free to comment/criticize/whatever if anything jumps out to you. Thanks!

Phonology

So I based the phonology (at least the consonants) somewhat on the Athabaskan family and Quechua. I knew I wanted to develop tone later on down the line, so a lot of my choices were informed by that. The vowel system takes some cues from (Vietnamese is a good example, but there are others which are probably a bit closer to what we have here).

Consonants

Some notes here:

1. All non-nasals and non-glides are devoiced word finally. Word final /l/ is realized as [ɬ]. Some dialects also devoice the glides, which are usually realized as voiceless fricatives in this environment.

2. All consonants geminate after stressed "light" vowels (more on what that is later) which do not have a phonemic coda consonant. Geminated ejective and aspirated stops are realized as a voiceless-ejective or voiceless-aspirate stop sequence. /ɾ:/ is realized as [r].

3. All aspirated stops are realized as pre-aspirates post-vocalically, unless they are geminated by the previous rule.

4. Voiceless stops are voiced between voiced phonemes including vowels, unless geminated by rule (2).

Also, I know affricates aren't technically stops, but they behave as stops here and in many natural languages so I put them in the same rows as the stops, whatever.

Vowels

Ok, monophthongs:

and diphthongs:

Not all that much to say here

Hey guys! I'm back with another post about my dino-alien language, Saurian!

As I got further into developing syntax and grammar rules, I realized that some of the choices I made for the phonology and phonotactics of my language were a bit too vague and impractical. So I decided to make some changes!

I know I already did some adjustments in my previous post about case marking and noun classes (link:https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/r46y5s/magic_levels_case_marking_and_more_in_saurian/), but, as I said, I think that many rules are not well defined. As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of the well-renowned book The Little Prince, puts it: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away".

So, without further ado, let's get right into the changes!

Phonology and orthography

I've made several changes to the phonology, especially for the vowels. Most of the sounds changed are the ones that weren't used that often when I created root words.

Here's the new phonology table for the consonants:

30 consonants

And for the vowels:

https://preview.redd.it/wrzpn2h88o681.png?width=250&format=png&auto=webp&s=221a07d4f5f4bb1d165feb6dc8b59936be72d972

Now, here's a list of the changes and the reasons for them:

1. Removed /ŋ/. Reason: I already got rid of /g/, so it seemed reasonable to get rid of /ŋ/since it sounds like /n/+/g/.
2. /q/, /q'/ and /qχ/ are no longer velarized (no more /qˠ/, /qˠ'/ and /qˠχ/). Reason: I think that it's an unnecessary distinction and when I pronounced these sounds, most of the time, it ended up sounding a lot like /ɢ/.
3. Removed /t̪θ/. Reason: it could get easily confused with /θ/ or even /ts/.
4. Removed /kʟ̝̊/, replaced it with /cʎ̝̊/. Reason: too far back in the mouth, quite difficult to pronounce. /cʎ̝̊/ seemed more plausible because at least /c/ and /ʎ̝̊/ are both palatal.
5. Added /ks/ as a distinct phoneme. Reason: as far as I know, /ks/ is not considered an affricate (I could be wrong though, feel free to correct me in the comments). I just wanted to indicate it as a separate phoneme and not a cluster because I really like it and I think it deserves some appreciation.
6. Removed /s^(x)/.

This is for a story I'm working on. I don't need or expect it to become so thoroughly put together that I could have entire conversations with it in real life, but I would like it to be put together enough that I don't have to resort to just writing, "Character A said something in his native language," every time I want to have him say something in his native language. I'd like to be able to show what the other characters are hearing.

The basic concept of this language is a dual conlang with a roughly 1-to-1 sound pairing for any given word, which allows two species with widely different vocal structures to communicate with each other. Where a human speaking this language would produce a [f] sound, the equivalent word in the reptilian version would produce [hiss #3] or whatever. So a word like "vaŝferu" means the same thing in both versions of the language, but each version would pronounce it differently based on what the species in question is capable of producing.

Not sure if the two versions would be classified as accents or dialects in its finished form. The fact that in canon the language was specifically created to work for both species also means it can be less naturalistic, but I still want it to feel like it's had some time to grow organically by the time it shows up in my story. Like there once was a complete 1-to-1 pairing between the two, but then linguistic drift happened separately as humans blurred the line between /ts/ and /dz/ while reptiles instead blurred the lines between /hiss #3/ and /hiss #4/. Or something like that.

I'm not going to create the reptilian version, because I have absolutely no idea how to go about doing that, but knowing that there has to be an equivalent that could theoretically be produced by a reptile plays a significant part in the construction of the human version. Hence the focus on fricatives and affricates, which can be easily hand-waved as being equivalent to a wide range of "hissing" sounds from the reptiles.

I originally thought it would be fitting to throw in some clicks, ejectives, or trills, but after a painful amount of time practicing and following tutorials, it turns out that I personally can't make my mouth do the things properly. Can't do trills reliably if at all, clicks are too slow and require a lot of pressure and focus to produce, and I can't connect ejectives to other sounds. So I can't test out words to see which configurations are "more difficult" and thus less likely to occur, and t

I believe that optic sensory processing is ipsilateral, and I've read some material on contralateral symptoms from lateral damage of the parietal lobe, which makes me wonder if there is any evidence of differences in processing sensory input from the right or left side of the body?

Is this phonology naturalistic? Phonology:

Nasals: /m̥, m, ŋ͡m, n̪̊, n̪, n̊, n, ɳ̊, ɳ, ŋ̊, ŋ/

Voiceless Plosives: /p, pʰ, p’, k͡p, t̪, t̪^(h), t̪’, t, tʰ, t’, ʈ, ʈʰ, ʈ’, k, k^(h), k’/

Voiced Plosives: /b, ᵐb, ɓ, ɡ͡b, d̪, ^(n̪)d̪, ɗ̪, d, ⁿd, ɗ, ɖ, ᶯɖ, ᶑ, g, ^(ŋ)g, ɠ/

Fricatives: /ɸ, ɸ’, θ, θ’, s, s’, ɬ, ɬ’, ʂ, ʂ’, x, x’/

Affricates: /t̪θ, t̪θ^(h), t̪θʼ, ts, ts^(h), tsʼ, tɬ, tɬ^(h), tɬʼ, ʈʂ, ʈʂ^(h), ʈʂʼ/

Approximate: /β, w, ð, l, ɻ, ɰ/

Vowels: /i, ĩ, ø, ø̃, æ, æ̃, ɚ, ɚ̃, u, ũ, o, õ, ʌ, ʌ̃, ɑ, ɑ̃/

Allophony:

Both the bilabial and dental approximates may be realized as voiced fricatives.

The retroflex approximate may be realized as an alveolar approximate.

The Labial-Velar plosives may be realized as implosives.

The Velar fricatives may be realized as Uvular fricatives.

Phonotactics:

(θ/s/ʂ)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(Nasal) with all consonants allowed on onset, all Vowels allowed in the Nucleus, and all consonants allowed on Coda.

No geminate and no vowel clusters are allowed, an /ɚ/ is inserted to separate illegal consonant clusters and a /p/ is inserted to separate vowel clusters.

Onset allow for the following clusters: θ or s or ʂ + Sonorant + Obstruent; and Coda allows for: Sonorant + Obstruent + Nasal.

Stress:

A syllable with a nasal vowel is considered heavy, with stress falling on the right most heavy syllable of a word, or if there is no heavy syllable, stress falls on the first syllable.

Stress is realized as a lowering of the pitch of the stressed syllable, vowels never centralize.

Consonant Harmony:

Is right-to-left starting from the right most morpheme and affects other affixes and the root. The Consonants that participate are dental, alveolar, and retroflex fricatives and affricates, that is consonants of differing articulation cannot co-occur in the same word.

Vowel Harmony:

Is root controlled with a word wide domain. There is blackness harmony where front and back vowels cannot co-occur in the same word. There is also roundness harmony in back vowels. The rhotic vowel may co-occur with all groups of vowels, not blocking the harmony from assimilating vowels after them.

Spoken in the mountainous heartlands of the Southern Continent, Srindi remains unique amongst recorded languages for its complex phonological profile compared to other widespread languages in the region.

Phonemic Inventory

Srindi is characterised by its three-way contrast in stops and affricates, distinguishing voicing and aspiration. Additionally, it possesses a distinction between alveolar and post-alveolar (often realized as partially palatalized) affricates and fricatives. This contrast is rare on the mainland but common to the Northern Island Languages like Vô or Hkán. Unlike those languages, however, Srindic nasals, glides and trills are not phonemically distinguished for voice.

Allophonically, the "plain series" -- /p, t, k, t͡s, t͡ʃ/ -- can be realized as weak ejectives, especially in certain dialects. Resonants are also subject to assimilatory voicing and devoicing when in contact with other consonants, but again this is not phonemic.

Srindi's vowel inventory follows a simple five-vowel system and lacks a length or breathiness distinction; they are usually realized as their cardinal values. Diphthongs are phonologically invalid, and subject to /h/ epenthesis; this is especially clear in inter-lingual borrowings:

peän (Hill Tribe "male reindeer") --> ṗehani (Srindi "reindeer")

However, vowel-glide sequences regularly occur in both onset and coda positions, such as šḳwezi /ʃkʰwɛzi/ ("javelin") and bziyʒi ("bumblebee").

Stress occurs on the initial syllable of a word and is thus non-contrastive.

Phonotactics

The defining para-linguistic feature of the Srindic languages is their initial consonant clusters. Such sequences regularly violate the sonority hierarchy, such as sprcelti or wžgami. The structure of a Srindic syllable is as follows:

(C0)(C1)(C2)(C3)V

Where C0 is equal to /s ~ z/, C1 to any consonant, and C2 and C3 any consonants which agree in voicing or aspiration with C1; V is any vowel. When clusters occur, Srindi has syllabic consonant harmony — sibilant affricates and fricatives, if clustered, must agree in their place of articulation, even if separated by another consonant. C0 is thus s

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if anyone knew how exactly the change in the pronunciation of the letter 'c' takes place historically. Going from the /k/ in civitas to the italian pronunciation /ch/ civitas > citta seems a little oddsince the /ch/ is close to the teeth and the /k/ is farther back in the mouth. Furthermore, with the spanish /s/ ciudad and Portuguese /s/ cidade, it seems like an odd development. I feel like I would expect maybe a change to a /g/ or something similar. Can anyone help me out? Thanks!!

Which phonemes do you pronounce in rugby or Rigby.

In theory it should be [ˈruɣ̞.β̞i]^([1]) (also [ˈraɣ̞.β̞i] 'cause of English /ʌ/) in standard Spanish, European or American, like the European Portuguese rúgbi,^([2]) but at least I pronounce it more often as [ˈrug̚.bi], I even hear it like that from other speakers.

I told my brother and mother to pronounce it, and they do it like me likewise.

Edit: I and my family are from Nicaragua, by the way; in the central part of the Americas. But I have to say my accent is very neutral, my only Nicaraguan feature is my voseo, which is a very common dialectical characteristic in the Americas (even in some areas of Spain, I think), not only in Rioplatense (Argentine and Uruguayan).

Hi everyone,

I remember vaguely that I have once read a Wikipedia Page of an - I think Siberian - language. That had an unique phonological feature: The sounds for l and r are allophones. However: r is used by male speakers and l by female speaker.

I don't find that language anymore, does anyone of you know that language and can name it to me?

Thanks!

What is the is the name for the phonological process which "n" substitutes "m" in the initial position?

For example, "nap" for "map" and "ne" for "me"

Thanks!

I think that I use k to s before front vowels and sonorant debuccalization between vowels wayyyy too often.

So I've returned to conlanging after a year long hiatus, and thoroughly despising my first two attempts.

Currently I've sketched out the grammar of the proto-lang and where i want to get towards for the modern language, as well as a 'middle step' in between... And I am in dire need of advice.

change from this (1)

to this... (2)

to this. (3)

I've written a number of sound change rules for change from (1) to (2) but when i applied them it doesn't seem to change the language much at all to my dismay. The changes are the following:

-unstressed vowels after a stressed syllable is lost

-o,u leave labialisation on stops and cause l labialise into ʋ

-l turns to r

-whenever j next to nasal they merge to ɲ

-whenever s, ʃ follows t, it turns into t͡s, t͡ʃ

-h strengthen to a ʔ between vowels

-u turns to y after s or ʃ

-o turns to y before ɲ

-iu turns to y

-ɾ turns to r

-word final consonants gets devoiced

-t, k turns to t͡s, t͡ʃ when preceding a front vowel ( i )

and I just get this:

before/after

and it looks basically the same. What do you think? Am I focusing on the wrong things here? besides cleaning up the syllable structure idk what to do... I got to where i wanted with the sounds and don't want to mess it up too much. How do you get more changes that actually make the words actually... look more different? without adding new sounds... I'm just really stuck here.

so tldr, the question is how do y'all approach selecting enough and significant sound changes that make the language actually feel different? Thanks!

This question comes after playing a lot of assassins creed Valhalla. Most of the A-S in the game are Christian, but some still talk about Woden and Valhol. I would assume these are the same as Odin and Valhalla, but sometimes they drop god names I do not recognize. (Can’t remember which ones atm, sorry). I’m not sure of they’re different Celtic dieties or an A-S god not present in the Norse pantheon.

Edit: just remember a few more god names. Tie and Funor. I’m guessing Tiw=Tyr, and Funor=Thor? Or maybe Fenrir?

First of all, the phonological evolution is huuuuge because in the story time somme 4,000 years have passed. It's my first time creating a proto lang, I usually don't really care about that.

Proto phonology (I totally just looked at the most common sounds in natural languages) :

the syllables are CVC but the long consonants cannot be in a consonnant cluster, and you cannot have the some short consonants two times in the syllabe cluster (eg : tt, pp, mm, etc)

Here is the phonology from the modern lang :

Diphtongues : ɔa, oi, ou, ai, ae, ie, ia, iu, øi, øu

Phonological changes from Proto to modern :

Categories : V = vowels, C = consonants, Z = voiced consonants, W = voiceless consonants, N = nasals

W{ZN} → Wː

Z{WN} → Zː

m{pbN} n{tdN} ŋ{kgN} → mː nː ŋː

pː tː kː bː dː gː mː nː ŋː sː hː lː jː wː → f θ x bʱ dʱ gʱ m ð ɣ z xː rl ʒ w

st(ː) → t͡s

{p b m t k h} → deleted / _#

u → o / _#

t d → tɬ dɮ / _{auo}

hl → ɬ

ɬ → xʲ

bʱ dʱ gʱ {xː xʲ} txʲ dɮ → v ð ɣ ʃ t͡ʃ d͡ʒ

θ ð → r l

u → ø / _l

o a → ø ɛ / _r

o a → ø ɛ / _(C)(C)i

e → ie / _{#ʃʒ}

{an un} → ial / _V

{an un} → ia

{uj aj} oj øj ej ij → ai oi øi ei i / _C

uw aw ow øw ew iw → u au ou øu eu iu / _C

Vj Vw → wV jV / C_C

{wj} → deleted / _C

w → deleted / {ŋkg}_

tk dg → t͡ʃg d͡ʒg

y → appears between voiced stops (non-nasal, eg : bd, bg dg, etc) consonant clusters

əɨ → appears between voiceless stops (non-nasal, eg : pk, tk, pt, etc) consonnant clusters

ə → appears between other stops (non-nasal) consonant clusters

g → dʒ / {aeij}_

t͡s lj → t͡ʃ ʎ

t d → t͡ʃ d͡ʒ / _j

ɪ → appears in consonants clusters formed with affricates, between the affricate and the other consonant

nothing → ɪ / CC_C

ɪ → i / { t͡ʃ d͡ʒ}_

ɪ → y / C_ / {wj}_

ɪ → e

ai au → ae ɔ / _ / _#

əɨ → ɔa

{j w} → deleted / V_V

rlV → rVlV / #_ (the vowel after the l is du

I remember learning about the idea of "normalese" in phonology -- a language with sounds that are very common cross linguistically. I can't find any literature on this topic -- is anyone familiar with the notion of a "boring" or "normalese" sound system from either their coursework or research? Did I totally misremember this or learn something idiosyncratic?

Hi! Tikorši is my first somewhat "good" conlang, so I'm very happy to show you some major features of it's phonology. I'm really looking forward to see some feedback, especially criticism about how naturalistic or logical some things are. Hope you'll enjoy it!

Syllable structure

Tikorši has a pretty simple (C)V(A)(C) syllable structure. In stressed position, C can be any consonant, V can be any vowel, A stands for (non-lateral) approximant. The coda consonant can be any sound except voiced stops or fricatives.

Consonants

Allophones:

/n t d s z ɾ l/ are dental [n̪ t̪ d̪ s̪ z̪ ɾ̪ l̪]

/n/ becomes [ŋ] before velars

/ɲ/ is realized as [j̃] before fricatives and optionally word finally

/t d k g/ become [ts dz kʲ gʲ] before /e i/

/k g/ are lenited to [ç~ɕ  ʝ~ʑ] before /y/

Cluster of /tʂ/ is realized as an affricate [t͡ʂ]

/ʂ ʐ/ aren't strongly retroflexed

/x ɣ/ are palatalized to [ç ʝ] before /e y/

/x/ might glottalize to [h] in coda

Clusters of /k/ and /x/ might be pronounced as [k͡x]

Cluster of /lɾ/ is realized as [r]

/l/ is a velarized [ɫ] before back vowels

/ʋ/ is realized as:

• [v] initially before front vowels
• [ʋ] initially before back vowels
• [ʋ~w] medially, with [w] mostly around back vowels
• [ʋ~w~∅] word finally

Voicing assimilation plays an important role. If there's an obstruent in the code, the next obstruent also must be voiceless, eg. šip (hair) + gaveset (forehead) = šipkaveset (eyebrow)

If there's an obstruent in the coda and the following sound is a sonorant, the obstruent is allophonically voiced, but it's not represented in the orthography, eg. lešnë [ˈleʐnə] (help n.)

Sections of two same consonants are prohibited and must be broken with an epenthetic vowel, usually a short /ə/. Phonetically though, double consonants often appear due to assimilation, as in talosši /'tɑlosʂi/ (flowery) being pronounced as [ˈtɑloʂːɨ].

*more under Vowel length

Vowels

/y/* and /ɒ/ occur only in stressed syllables

Vowel clusters are not allowed so if two vowels collide, they are separated by either /j/ or /ʋ/.

Allophones:

/æ/ is generally pronounced as [ɛ̞] but it's t

I know it's really similar to a recent question, I swear I wrote it down some days ago to remember to ask it after the exam I had this morning.

Edit. Of your language or accent

all i could think of was the abkhazian language but nothing else came to my mind.

Ah, English. One of the languages that has a HUGE mismatch between its orthography and phonology. Let's clean it up, shall we? We'll do it BY MAKING EVERYTHING INTO MULTIGRAPHS! MUAHAHAHAHA!

Note: This is based off Received Pronunciation English.

m - mm(e) (as in programme)

n - nn(e) (as in tonne)

ŋ - ngch (from Greek nasal gamma-chi)

p - gh (from "hiccough")

t - tt(e) (from "gazette")

tʃ - ttshch (combined t and ʃ.)

k - qk (both Q and K make the [k] sound.)

b - mp (from Greek mu-pi)

d - nt (from Greek nu-tau)

dʒ - ntszh (combined d and ʒ)

ɡ - gk (from Greek gamma-kappa)

f - ph (from Greek phi)

θ - phth (combined f and th)

s - cc(e) (from the homoglyphic Greek lunate sigma, Coptic sima, and Cyrillic ess)

ʃ - shch (from Russian shcha)

x - khgh (combined kh and yogh)

h - shh (from the Unicode name for "Һ", shha)

v - bh (from Irish)

ð - bhdh (combined v and dh)

z - sz

ʒ - szh (combined z and h)

l - ll(e)

ɹ - rr(e)

j - gi (from Greek gamma-iota)

w - gou (from Greek gamma-omicron-upsilon)

æ - ae (from Norwegian/Danish æ)

a~ɑ - aah

o - oh

ɒ - aough

ɔː - augh (as in taught)

ɪ - iy (from the similar-sounding Cyrillic yery)

e~ɛ - eh

ʌ - ugh

ʊ - ou (from Greek omicron-upsilon)

uː - oo

i - ie

iː - ee

eɪ - eigh (from "eight")

oʊ - ough (from "though")

aɪ - igh (from "high")

ɔɪ - oaigh (combined ɔ and aɪ)

aʊ - aaough (combined a and oʊ)

ɝ - err

ɔ˞ - orr

ɪɚ - iyurr

eɚ - eurr

ʊɚ - uurr

ɚ - urr

ə - uh

Rrooulle: Aughlle qkaoughmmehnnttcc aoughnne bhdhiycc ghoughcctte mmughcctte mpee rriyttuhnne ntszhughcctte llighqk bhdhiycc. Gkount llughqk ccghehlliyngch llighqk bhdhiycc aennnt rreentiyngch qkaoughmmehnnttcc ccghehlltte llighqk bhdhiycc!

Assuming two adjacent identical consonants in the same syllable, a consonant cluster does not form. Meanwhile, ee, oo, and aa (baa, bazaar, aah) each sound different from e, o, and a. (I can't find an ii word where it doesn't lead to another syllable, and words like vacuum and muumuu could otherwise be spelled with one u in those syllables.)

1: What are other languages that do this? I know Spanish, and of course ll and rr are digraphs for sounds different from what's represented by l and r.

2: For any language + writing system that does this, why is this the case?

I'm working on a conlang, which is inspired by Japanese, and I am trying to figure out how a language like Japanese would sound in my conlang. I have a few questions regarding phonotactics and phoneme inventory:

I know that Korean, a cousin of Japanese, can only use the sounds in the following:

a, e, i, o, u, y,

I know that Japanese has a very limited amount of consonant phonemes, but I haven't seen a phonotactic chart.

I have a few phonemes that are completely absent in Japanese, (only two, and they are both vowels)

a e i o u y

What are they? What are they used for?

What are the sounds that I have in my conlang, that are missing from Japanese?

I know that aesthetics are very subjective, and what sounds nice to one might sound horrible to another, but nonetheless I wanted to see if there was a way to get a little closer to some sort of “objectively beautiful” phonology.

So I did a bit of research, and it turns out that there are two big trends that shape what languages people tend to consider beautiful.

The first is how people perceive the culture that speaks the language in question. Individuals tend to have a higher appreciation for the language of a people or country who they see in a positive light, and are more likely to consider the language of a culture they have poor esteem of as “barbaric” or the like.

The second is how closely the language in question resembles the hearer’s native tongue. Most people have a natural bias towards their own mother tongue, and will consider languages with sounds/tones/phonotactics that are similar to their native language to be beautiful, and will be put off by languages which make contrasts they aren’t familiar with.

Consider the famous quote (attributed to Charles V): “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.” This might have had more to do with disdain for the German people and unfamiliarity with the language more than any quality of the language itself.

Now, I wanted to find a way to create a phonology based on each of these two criteria, in order to then compare the two. What I did was this: for the cultural aspect, rather than trying to look up historical conflicts/alliances and the like, I thought it would be simpler to search for polls where people voted for their favourite languages; I assumed that any cultural biases would naturally reflect themselves in the result. I also tried to include some non-Western polls in my search, but unfortunately I’m limited to Japanese in that regard. Languages that frequently came at the top of both English and Japanese polls were French and Italian. English polls also tended to rate Spanish rather highly, as well as Japanese (which was kind of unexpected for me). Japanese polls tend to favour Mandarin and Korean.

Now, to these languages I also added three of my choosing, to slightly influence the resulting inventory—which is rather counter-productive, I admit, if my goal is objectivity; this probably means I should redo the experiment without such tampering, though in reality I doubt the end result was affected that much. I decided to add Welsh and Finnish, which wer

has anyone taken phonology I with colin wilson? how was the workload? also, if you have taken it and wouldn't mind sharing the syllabus with me, let me know!

thanks!

You'd be hard pressed to come across a conlanger who hadn't heard of the tri-consonantal root system, and among those you'd be even harder pressed to find one who didn't think it very cool. While the majority of languages are fairly content to go with affixes and maybe a bit of reduplication, a few have some really cool forms of morphology. I might mention celtic consonant mutation, indo-european ablaut,, uralic consonant gradation, and I would be tempted to mention whatever georgian has going on, though I can't really comment there since I haven't actually got a clue what it is that georgian has going on (any good explanations much appreciated).

Notwithstanding the tentative inclusion of georgian's madness, do any of your languages have a unique or at least highly rare system of morpho-phonology? How does it work, and did you plan it or stumble upon it? Also, are there any good examples of this kind of thing I failed to mention?

I have read de Boer's The Historical Development of Japanese Tone (2010) and Shimabukuro's The Accentual History of the Japanese and Ryukyuan Languages (2007), but the first work takes a very Japanese-centric approach and I feel is not comparative enough, while the second seems to be in contradiction with e.g. Frellesvig's (2008) and Miyako's (2003) different phonologies of proto-Japonic and Old Japanese respectively (postulating a large number of long vowels where the phonological reconstructions do not). Furthermore, Vovin and Beckwith also seem to not postulate long vowels for insular Proto-Japonic compared to Koguryo, which gives me the feeling that Shimabukuro's analysis with lengths is either outdated or fringe. Are there any papers or even monographs that you could recommend me that build upon the otherwise decent accentual comparison system in Shimabukuro (2008), as well as other newer investigations into Proto-Japonic vowel phonology?

EG clicks in Khoisian languages exclusive to Southeastern Africa or the languages of West Africa which require speakers to simultaneously produce consonant sounds with their lips and soft palate as compared to Indo-European languages which, while they do have their own quirks and difficulties seem overall simpler. And the further you get from our original homeland the simpler the phonology of languages seem to get such as the Japanese and Austronesian families which don't feature consonant clusters like Indo-European languages. Is there anything there or is my read on it total BS?

Hello everyone, for a phonology assignment on the Thai language, I am looking for a two-syllable word where in the first syllable there is the sound [r] (ร) between two vowels. Thank You!