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Let's Make a Language: Day 3, Sound Inventory

Day 3 came early because it is going to be a short one. Much of what will be included is up in the air and subject to change until much later in the process.

After giving my consonant inventory some thought, I settle on a hard/soft distinction and an aspiration distinction instead of the voicing distinction I was originally thinking of using, winding up with an inventory that looks something like this:

Its quite large, larger than I was expecting, but I wanted to fit in a few sounds I haven't used in a while like the affricates. 

As for the vowels, I went with the classic five vowels with a length distinction caused by historical loss of weak consonants. This historical sound change creates two classes of syllables which will interface with the tones quite well.

Allophonically there isn't much happening here. Most of the variations are in the vowels, which devoice between unaspirated consonants and a centralizing of /o/ because I like the sound (haha).

I did decide to include tones, which came about through the devoicing of onset consonants and loss of coda consonants. Very simple tones, 2 tones high and low with a neutral tone and 2 contours: high-low and low-high.

The syllable structure I've settled on is strictly CV. Leaving us with some nonce words like:

  • [fʲa5le]
  • [t͡se1pö]
  • [paː51sʲula5]

Which I think are quite beautiful.

Stress is still up in the air, and as for tone sandhi... lets not for right now.

I do have other ideas for phonemic inventories, but for now this is what I'm sticking with.

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