Wait a minute. You already wanna make words? Hol' your horses, buddy! We gotta work on our phonology first! What's a phonology, I hear you ask? A phonology is basically a list of sounds used in your language. They can be sorted into charts, like in the International Phonetic Alphabet! You gotta compile all your sounds.
First, you have to take into consideration where the people who speak your language live. If they live in harsher climates, like mountains or desert, they will speak harsher sounds. If they live in a plain, grassy field, they will have more familiar sounds to an English speaker.
However, the most common sound cross-linguistically is always the voiced bilabial nasal, /m/, pronounced like the m in mouse. So, it'd make sense to add that.
My society live in snowy dark mountains, so they should have:
- Uncommon sounds
- Harsh sounds
A great sound for these mountain dwellers would be /x/, pronounced like the ch in 'loch'. And since we have /x/, we just GOTTA have /ɣ/, a sound not found in English. Well, beans! How will Anglophones speak this? That's the point. No one really speaks this. It's a fictional language!! AHAHA!
I believe, we should add sounds that most languages do have: like /t/, /d/, /l/ and /p/.
There are some distinctions that don't really need to be made in a naturalistic language, such as the f-v distinction, which many languages like Hindi don't bother to differentiate anyway, other than loan words. Most of the time, we have one of these sounds or none at all.
I believe, we should still keep both /t/ and /d/, as they are different, noticeably more different than /f/ and /v/.
Another interesting decision we must make is what our rhotic shall be. A rhotic is the language's 'r' sound. Most, if not all languages have a rhotic sound of some sort. While the voiced alveolar trill (the 'rr' in Spanish 'perro'; a rolled 'r') is EXTREMELY tempting to use, I ultimately decided on a voiced uvular fricative AKA /ʁ/ (the first 'r' in French 'rester').
I think it's fair to include labialization: where the phoneme 'ba' becomes 'bwa', basically adding a 'w' sound to the end of a consonant.
My last addition would be aspiration. Aspirating a consonant is when you say it while releasing a large puff of air, applying pressure to it.
Now, after some major tweaks, this is the consonant inventory of our new language!:
/m/ /mʷ/
/n/ /nʷ/
/p/ /pʷ/ /pʰ/
/b/ /bʷ/ /bʰ/
/t/ /tʷ/ /tʰ/
/d//dʷ//dʰ/
/q/ /qʷ/
/k/ /kʷ/
/g/ /gʷ/
/x/ /xʷ/
/ɣ/
/ʁ/ /ʁʷ/
/ʔ/ (the gap in 'uh-oh')
/h/
/l/
/j/
OH CHRYSLER!! I FORGOT ABOUT THE VOWELS!! This is a protolang, first of all. Basically, a historical language, which we will base our finished language on! I think, we should stick to the five vowel system, with an option to change vowel length.
i (ː)
u (ː)
e (ː)
o (ː)
u (ː)
a (ː)
And I believe that covers our Phonology topic, kids! Put your folders away and stand behind your desk! Next time, we'll be discussing orthography, a really interesting part of language-building and we might even get into custom scripts!
See ya next time!
