Let’s make a language – Part 1b: Isian Phonology

This will be a much shorter post than the one last week, since we have all the theory bits out of the way. This time, we’re solely focusing on the sound system of our “simpler” conlang, Isian. Rather than just give a list of sounds, though, I’ll try to justify some of my choices as we go.

Isian Consonants

	Labial	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m	n
Stop	p b	t d		k g
Affricate			tʃ dʒ
Fricative	f	s	ʃ	x	h
Approximant	w	l r	j

Isian has a total of 19 consonant phonemes. None of them are too exotic, though monolingual American speakers might have a little trouble with /x/, the “ch” sound in German acht or Scottish loch. Everything else should be familiar. If you don’t know the IPA symbols for the palatal consonants, that’s okay. In order, /tʃ dʒ ʃ j/ are the initial sounds of church, judge, shut, and yet. Also, the /r/ phoneme can be either a tap [ɾ] like Spanish or an approximant [ɹ] like English, though the first pronunciation will be the “official” one.

So why these particular 19 sounds? Well, Isian is supposed to be easy to pronounce, but I still want it to look and sound a little “foreign”. /x/ accomplishes this feat (for Americans, anyway).

English speakers might notice what’s been left out. There’s no /v/ (as in view), /z/ (as in zip) or /ŋ/ (as in *sing). That’s all right, because of allophones. Between vowels, /f s ʃ/ can sound like [v z ʒ] (the last as in French jour or English azure), and /x/ can disappear altogether, instead making the vowel before it sound a little longer. Or it could sound like [h], if the two vowels it’s between are the same. So we might have /taxa/ pronounced more like [taha], but /tixa/ as [tiːa]. Some of our fictitious speakers might instead substitute the voiced velar fricative [ɣ]; we’ll say that this is an older and more formal pronunciation.

In the same way, /m/ and /n/ will assimilate to a following consonant, except approximants and /h/. Before a labial, /n/ becomes [m]. Likewise, /m/ comes out as [n] before an alveolar. Both of them will subtly change to [ɲ] before palatals and [ŋ] before velars.

There are no TH sounds, since those are relatively rare, and Isian is meant to be fairly average. For the same reason, we don’t have any phonemic alterations like palatalization or aspiration going on. Voiceless stops might sound aspirated at the beginning of a word, like English, or not, but this can be explained away as a dialect feature.

Isian Vowels

	Front	Central	Back
High	i		u
Central	e		o
Low		a

Isian’s vowel system is an average one, with the five cardinal vowels. But we’ll embellish it a little with some allophonic alteration.

First, these aren’t the only vowel sounds possible. We’ll say that any of the three “lower” vowels /a e o/, when followed by a /j/ or /w/ consonant, creates a diphthong, a kind of combination of two vowels in the same syllable. It doesn’t take much math to see that this creates six diphthongs: /aj ej oj aw ew ow/.

• /aj/ is about the same as the English long-I sound in lie,
• /ej/ is close to the English long-A sound in lay,
• /oj/ is pronounced like in English toy,
• /aw/ can be the sound in English law or loud (we can write this off as dialect differences),
• /ow/ is the English long-O in low,
• /ew/ isn’t in English, but it’s the first vowel sound in Spanish or Italian neutro. We’ll say that some dialects pronounce it as [iʊ], like English few.

So, even though we have only five vowel phonemes, thanks to diphthongs, it seems like we have 11.

Second, we’ll say that a few vowels change a little before certain consonants. /a/ becomes [æ] (English ash) before the palatal consonants /tʃ dʒ ʃ/. And we saw above how vowels before /x/ might become lengthened. Finally, although we haven’t discussed syllables and stress, we’ll say that unstressed vowels tend to be “reduced” in fast or colloquial speech. For example, an unstressed /a/ might sound like a schwa ([ə]), like in English about.

Orthography

Orthography is, basically, how a language is written. Isian certainly isn’t going to have its own writing system; we’ll just use the alphabet. But we need a way to convert the phonemes into letters. English, of course, is notorious for being hard to spell, but Isian has far fewer phonemes, so it should be easier to fit into 26 letters.

Most of the phonemes can just be written as the appropriate letters. That works just fine for all the vowels, as well as the consonants /p b m f w n t d s l r g h/. The remaining six sounds need a little more thought. Here’s what we’ll do:

• /k/ will usually be written as c, but k when it comes before /i/ or /e/. (This is mostly an aesthetic change. There’s nothing stopping us from writing k everywhere.)
• /tʃ/ will be written ch, like it is in English. The same for /dʒ/ as j, /ʃ/ as sh, and /j/ as y.
• /x/ can be written as kh. We can’t use ch, like German, since it’s already taken, and x would give English readers the wrong impression. Sometimes, you have to compromise.

So our full orthography for Isian looks like this:

Written	Phoneme	Description
a	/a/	a in father; a in cash before ch, sh, and j
b	/b/	b in boy
c	/k/	c in cat; only used before a, o, or u
ch	/tʃ/	ch in church
d	/d/	d in dog
e	/e/	e in Spanish peso
f	/f/	f in fish
g	/g/	g in go (always a “hard” G)
h	/h/	h in hard
i	/i/	i in French fini
j	/j/	j in jet
k	/k/	k in key; only used before i and e
kh	/x/	ch in German nacht
l	/l/	l in list
m	/m/	m in man
n	/n/	n in note
o	/o/	au in French haut
p	/p/	p in pit or top
r	/r/	r in run or Spanish cero
s	/s/	s in sat
sh	/ʃ/	sh in sharp
t	/t/	t in top or hot
u	/u/	ou in French sous
w	/w/	w in wet; creates diphthongs after a, e, or o
y	/j/	y in yes; creates diphthongs after a, e, or o

The next post will switch over to Ardari. When we come back to Isian, we’ll make these sounds into syllables, then into words.