Skip to main content

Phonology 101

Phonology is basically the inventory of sounds that can exist in your language. All the conlanging resources I found said that you need to start by developing a phonology for your conlang first. When I began, I just made a complete list of the sounds in English and Bulgarian, the two languages I speak, and came up with something like this: p b m, f v th d l s z sh zh t d, k g r. I didn't yet realize there is a voiced th and an unvoiced th, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to include a trilled r or not. I grouped them into vague classes of front of the mouth, middle of mouth, and back of the mouth. I also included ten vowel sounds that I thought were important and not diphthongs (i as in bit, e as in bet, a as in bat, u as in butt, o as in boat, ey as in beet, ay as in bait, iy as in bite, aw as in bought, oo as in boot). Yeah, in retrospect, iy is pretty much a diphthong of aw and ey, but I liked the vowel and I didn't know better yet. I kind of started playing around with these sounds just to see what I would come up with and tried to think how I could make up a language, because I knew nothing at this point. And I went nowhere, really, for about two years.

Let me give you an important tip: the International Phonetic Alphabet chart could have saved me a lot of time if I had known to look for it! This chart shows pretty much every sound humans make in any language, and gives you names of different sound classes, like plosives, fricatives, dental, uvular, and much more. Now, I don't know how to make every sound on the chart, but there are lots of resources on the internet as to how to figure this out, including this one on Wikipedia.

Once I had found these resources, my list started shaping up. The vowels stayed the same, although I changed how I expressed them in English, but I grouped the sounds differently and put some new ones in:
ee as in beet, ei as in bait, ai as in bite, au as in bought, oo as in boot, i as in bit, e as in bet, a as in bat, u as in but, and o as in boat
p t k (unvoiced plosives) b d g (voiced plosives) f th s sh (unvoiced fricatives)
m n l r (liquids and nasals) h (which I wasn't sure where to put) and v z zh j ch (these are voiced fricatives and some combined sounds that I decided would not be in the initial phonology of my language, but would creep in later).

Thats all for now. Next I started working on Morphology but got some interesting surprises...

Comments

Anonymous said…
Phonology. I've come to greatly appreciate it, and become keenly aware of it in my daily life.

I can't rightly recall where I came across it, but my understanding of and interest in phonetics exploded when I discovered the IPA and X-SAMPA, (the latter of which I greatly prefer).

The website I found which discussed the Black Speech of Mordor pointed out to me that which now seems obvious: For every point of articulation, you can have a voice and unvoiced phoneme. My world changed when I came to understand this. It was an epiphany.

The phonology of Glaubuurz was set by the time I got there, with a bit of variation between dialects, so it wasn't truly necessary for me to wrap my head around the concepts, but as I moved closer to realizing my own language, I purchased a book called A Practical Introduction to Phonetics, by J. C. Catford. This book helped me come to the understanding I've reached, and I would credit it with quite a lot of inspiration.

I wonder to myself how languages can be taught to children without first discussing phonology. I wonder at our ability to pick up the phonology of a language without understanding a thing about the sounds we're making. I can't go back to seeing words the way I used to, and I think I'm better for it. A wonderful example of how conlanging has enriched my life.

- Baalak Nalzar-aung.

Popular posts from this blog

Tolkien's Alphabets

I was working on my fonts for my conlang again and I starting thinking about alphabets in general, and I thought it would be fun to do a post on Tolkien's Middle Earth alphabets, Cirth and Tengwar. First, let's take a look at Cirth , which was used to write Khuzdul, the dwarvish language, as well as Quenya and Sindarin, the elvish languages. It was based on the Norse & Anglo-Saxon Futhark runes. There's nothing very fancy about this alphabet, it functions much the same as our own; each glyph represent one character. But note that the different letters correspond to each other in certain ways: letters that are phonetically close to each other look similar. P and B, for example. B is pretty much the "voiced" form of P (voiced means that your vocal chords are engaged and vibrating). B looks just like P but its got that extra little stroke sticking out there, making it look like an R. Same thing for T and D, and K and G. And those are just the plosives; lo...

Orthography - Making Your Own Alphabet

This is Part One, Part Two , Part Three The idea of making up my own alphabet was probably the first thing that attracted me to conlanging. After I learned Bulgarian, I made up a code that was based on Cirth and Bulgarian . I sent my brother the code and would mail him letters using it, just for fun. I started thinking about developing a new alphabet later, when I was playing the Myst games, and I saw the flowing script of D'Ni  (D'Ni is a conlang Cyan/Richard Watson developed for their games and books). First things to consider as you start developing your alphabet - What do you want? a phonetic alphabet a non-phonetic alphabet (like English) or a syllable-based alphabet (meaning one character per syllable, like po, kee, ot, or kel, would be represented by one character/Tibetan is syllabic) or an abjad, which would be a consonant-only-alphabet, and all vowels would be represented by diacritic marks (Hebrew and Arabic are examples) A little research on Omniglot will...

My Top Six Conlanging Tools in 2025

Hello! I'm still alive. And I'm still conlanging. A brief summary of the decade-long hiatus: we moved from California to Texas at the beginning of 2013, and I was really busy with work and starting a lightsaber group, cosplaying, gaming and other geeky things after the move. I wasn't sure what else I had to add to the conlanging space while all these movies and TV shows with amazing conlangs were dropping left and right. In 2009, we got Avatar with the Na'avi conlang by Paul Frommer. In 2011, we got Game of Thrones with Dothraki fleshed out by the very awesome David Peterson. In 2013 we got Defiance, Syfy's TV series with multiple conlangs by the still very awesome David Peterson. Maybe I wanted to sit back and let the pros teach me for awhile, but I kept playing with conlanging here and there. Whenever I thought about MakeALAng, I couldn't get into the same headspace and come up with anything that I thought would be of broad interest.  In 2022, I was amazed to...