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blog: reconlangmo 2 - phonology and writing (#142)
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title: "ReConLangMo 2: Phonology & Writing"
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date: 2020-05-08
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series: reconlangmo
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tags:
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- conlang
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- lewa
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---
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# ReConLangMo 2: Phonology & Writing
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Continuing from [the last post][rclm1], one of the next steps in this process is
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to outline the phonology and basic phonotactics of L'ewa. A language's phonology
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is the set of sounds that are allowed to be in words. The phonotactics of a
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language help people understand where the boundaries between syllables are. I
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will then describe my plans for the L'ewa orthography and how L'ewa is
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romanized. This is a response to the prompt made [here][rclm2prompt].
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[rclm1]: https://christine.website/blog/reconlangmo-1-name-ctx-history-2020-05-05
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[rclm2prompt]: https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/gfp3hw/reconlangmo_2_phonology_writing/
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## Phonology
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I am taking inspiration from Lojban, Esperanto, Mandarin Chinese and English to
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design the phonology of L'ewa. All of the phonology will be defined using the
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[International Phonetic Alphabet][ipa]. If you want to figure out how to
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pronounce these sounds, a lazy trick is to google them. Wikipedia will have a
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perfectly good example to use as a reference. There are two kinds of sounds in
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L'ewa, consonants and vowels.
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[ipa]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet
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### Consonants
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*Consonant inventory*: /d g h j k l m n p q s t w ʃ ʒ ʔ ʙ̥/
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| Manner/Place | Bilabial | Alveolar | Palato-alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Labio-velar | Uvular | Glottal |
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|---------------------|----------|----------|-----------------|---------|-------|-------------|--------|---------|
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| Nasal | m | n | | | | | | |
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| Stop | p | t d | | | k g | | q | ʔ |
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| Fricative | | s | ʃ ʒ | | | | | h |
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| Approximant | | | | j | | w | | |
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| Trill | ʙ̥ | | | | | | | |
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| Lateral approximant | | l | | | | | | |
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The weirdest consonant is /ʙ̥/, which is a voiceless bilabial trill, or blowing
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air through your lips without making sound. This is intended to imitate a noise
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an orca would make.
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### Vowels
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*Vowel inventory*: /a ɛ i o u/
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*Diphthongs*: au, oi, ua, ue, uo, ai, ɛi
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| | Front | Back |
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|----------|-------|------|
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| High | i | u |
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| High-mid | | o |
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| Low-mid | ɛ | |
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| Low | a | |
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## Phonotactics
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I plan to have two main kinds of words in L'ewa. I plan to have content and
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particle words. The content words will refer to things, properties, or actions
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(such as `tool`, `red`, `run`) and the particle words will change how the
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grammar of a sentence works (such as `the` or prepositions).
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The main kind of content word is a root word, and they will be in the following
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forms:
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- CVCCV (/ʒa.sko/)
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- CCVCV (/lʔ.ɛwa/)
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Particles will mostly fall into the following forms:
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- V (/a/)
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- VV (/ai/)
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- CV (/ba/)
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- CVV (/bai/)
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Proper names _should_ end with consonants, but there is no hard requirement.
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L'ewa is a stressed language, with stress on the second-to-last (penultimate)
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syllable. For example, the word "[zh]asko" would be pronounced "[ZH]Asko".
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Syllables end on stop consonants if one is present in a consonant cluster. Two
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stop consonants cannot follow eachother in a row.
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## Writing
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I haven't completely fleshed this part out yet, but I want the writing system of
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L'ewa to be an [abugida][abugida]. This is a kind of written script that has the
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consonants make the larger shapes but the vowels are small diacritics over the
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consonants. If the word creation process is done right, you can actually omit
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the vowels entirely if they are not relevant.
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[abugida]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida
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I plan to have this script be written by hand with pencils/pen and typed into
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computers, just like English. This script will also be a left-to-right script
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like English.
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## Romanisation
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L'ewa's romanization is intentionally simple. Most of the IPA letters keep their
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letters, but the ones that do not match to Latin letters are listed below:
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| Pronunciation | Spelling |
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|---------------|----------|
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| /j/ | *y* |
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| /ɛ/ | *e* |
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| /ʃ/ | *x* |
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| /ʒ/ | *z* |
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| /ʔ/ | *'* |
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| /ʙ̥/ | *b* |
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This is designed to make every letter typeable on a standard US keyboard, as
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well as mapping as many letters as possible on the home row of a QWERTY
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keyboard.
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---
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I am still working on the tooling for word creation and the like. I plan to use
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the [Swaedish lists][swaedish] (this site is having certificate issues at the
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time of writing this post) to help guide the creation of a base vocabulary. I
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will go into more detail in the future.
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[swaedish]: https://cals.info/word/list/
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