The last couple of posts have been a sort of fire hose of my personal thoughts on language. I went ahead and put them out first because I think they're good to keep in mind going forward into the actual process, but there's going to be a bit of shift in focus. This post is my first real set of instructions on the nitty-gritty bits of conlanging.
It's a tradition among conlangers to begin their process with phonology. I might question the necessity of this, but in any case it's a fine place to start. Before you understand phonology, however you must understand phonetics. If you're up to speed on your Greek roots you might guess that these both have to do with sound, and you'd be right. That's where the similarity ends, though. In fact, if you understand this distinction you'll be ahead of most conlangers. For whatever reason, amateur conlangers have a tendency to conflate phonetics and phonology, but the truth is that they are very separate and understanding the difference is key for good, realistic conlanging. The knowledge I'm about to impart will put you head and shoulders above many experienced conlangers.
Phonetics is the study of the sounds of human language. Linguists and conlangers in particular tend to focus upon articulatory phonetics, and with good reason, but acoustic phonetics is a thing as well and I may reference it from time to time. Articulatory phonetics studies how the human vocal tract produces sound. In linguistics, we refer to each individual sound as a phone, though this may be an iffy concept. No sound will ever be produced exactly the same way twice, and phonetics attempts to describe sounds in general terms. In phonetics one hears talk of the spectrum of narrow vs. broad description. This is simply a measure of how exactly a sound is described. Perfectly narrow transcription would consist of a high-quality recording and an x-ray of the speaker's vocal tract as they spoke. However, for the sake of convenience, we tend instead to describe a phone in terms of its features, and a more narrow transcription simply contains more information about the features of speech.
This is a diagram of the human vocal tract:
There are many separate components at work here, including the lips, tongue, nasal passages, and vocal cords (larynx). The may act in relative independence to give rise to a whole host of combinatory sounds. People are sometimes surprised to learn that there is a very strict organization among the sounds we make, and every phone may be described by its features. However, we can indeed characterize every sound by the behaviors of each of these components. The most basic distinction among sounds, one you are more than likely familiar with, is between vowels and consonants, though in reality there is a slight bit of gray area even between these.
A vowel sound is one in which the mouth is open and there is minimal obstruction of the airstream. In vowels, as in almost everything in phonetics, the tongue is the most major player. (It's no coincidence that "tongue" is a euphemism for language in so many different languages.) Vowels are chiefly characterized by the position of the tongue in the mouth. The chart below is an abstracted representation of the oral cavity in the diagram above:
It refers to the positioning of the tongue within the mouth, where left is further forward, right is further back, and down lower, with the jaw wider. Note that this corresponds to the model above. Towards the upper left, we have high front vowels, "ee" sounds. In the upper right are high back vowels, "oo" sounds. And towards the bottom are low vowels, "ah" sounds. For a more full set of vowel sounds with recording, click here. (Note that this link makes use of IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. The long story short is that in the 19th century, several old white guys sat down and invented a way to represent every sound of human language. It remains the gold standard for linguists, and will be used throughout this and future posts.) Another prominent feature in vowels is rounding, or whether or not the lips are pulled together in an "o" shape. By convention, as in the link above, rounded and unrounded sounds are written in pairs, with unround to the left and round to the right. Additionally, nasalization (opening of the nasal passage) and phonation (qualities of the vocal cords' behavior that I won't discuss here) may characterize vowel sounds.
Consonants are sounds in which the airstream is more obstructed, and are altogether more complex. Consonants tend to be chiefly organized by place of articulation (where it's obstructed) and manner of articulation (how it's obstructed). The chief pulmonic (don't ask - non-pulmonics are a whole other can of worms) manners of articulation include stops, fricatives, nasals, and approximants. (Ask me sometime why this organization is a cop-out, but I don't want to get started now. This post is already super long, I know.) In short, stops are formed when the airstream is for a moment entirely blocked; fricatives when the airstream is closed enough to create a turbulent airstream but not entirely stopped; approximants by obstructing the airstream a little, though not even enough to produce frication; and nasals by redirecting sound through the nasal cavity. Place of articulation is an even more complex matter. The diagram below shows all places of articulation:
In general, sounds will be produced by constriction at one of these places. However, it is perfectly possible to produce sound by blocking or constricting several places. This is called coarticulation. The most common examples of coarticulation include labialization, by which the lips are rounded during pronunciation, palatalization, when the dorsal region of the tongue pulls up toward the soft palate, and pharyngealization, when the pharynx (back of the throat) is tightened. These coarticulations can all be paired with other sounds to create very complex consonants. The link above also provides an organized chart of pulmonic consonants (though coarticulation is disregarded) with recordings.
Hopefully this fly-by of speech articulation mechanics gives you a basic enough idea of phonetics to successfully move forward. I'll post about many other specific phonetics topics at a later time.
It's a tradition among conlangers to begin their process with phonology. I might question the necessity of this, but in any case it's a fine place to start. Before you understand phonology, however you must understand phonetics. If you're up to speed on your Greek roots you might guess that these both have to do with sound, and you'd be right. That's where the similarity ends, though. In fact, if you understand this distinction you'll be ahead of most conlangers. For whatever reason, amateur conlangers have a tendency to conflate phonetics and phonology, but the truth is that they are very separate and understanding the difference is key for good, realistic conlanging. The knowledge I'm about to impart will put you head and shoulders above many experienced conlangers.
Phonetics is the study of the sounds of human language. Linguists and conlangers in particular tend to focus upon articulatory phonetics, and with good reason, but acoustic phonetics is a thing as well and I may reference it from time to time. Articulatory phonetics studies how the human vocal tract produces sound. In linguistics, we refer to each individual sound as a phone, though this may be an iffy concept. No sound will ever be produced exactly the same way twice, and phonetics attempts to describe sounds in general terms. In phonetics one hears talk of the spectrum of narrow vs. broad description. This is simply a measure of how exactly a sound is described. Perfectly narrow transcription would consist of a high-quality recording and an x-ray of the speaker's vocal tract as they spoke. However, for the sake of convenience, we tend instead to describe a phone in terms of its features, and a more narrow transcription simply contains more information about the features of speech.
This is a diagram of the human vocal tract:
A vowel sound is one in which the mouth is open and there is minimal obstruction of the airstream. In vowels, as in almost everything in phonetics, the tongue is the most major player. (It's no coincidence that "tongue" is a euphemism for language in so many different languages.) Vowels are chiefly characterized by the position of the tongue in the mouth. The chart below is an abstracted representation of the oral cavity in the diagram above:
Consonants are sounds in which the airstream is more obstructed, and are altogether more complex. Consonants tend to be chiefly organized by place of articulation (where it's obstructed) and manner of articulation (how it's obstructed). The chief pulmonic (don't ask - non-pulmonics are a whole other can of worms) manners of articulation include stops, fricatives, nasals, and approximants. (Ask me sometime why this organization is a cop-out, but I don't want to get started now. This post is already super long, I know.) In short, stops are formed when the airstream is for a moment entirely blocked; fricatives when the airstream is closed enough to create a turbulent airstream but not entirely stopped; approximants by obstructing the airstream a little, though not even enough to produce frication; and nasals by redirecting sound through the nasal cavity. Place of articulation is an even more complex matter. The diagram below shows all places of articulation:
Hopefully this fly-by of speech articulation mechanics gives you a basic enough idea of phonetics to successfully move forward. I'll post about many other specific phonetics topics at a later time.
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