up to speed - march 26th
i have been doodling up an ial this month of march. it seems every two or three months i make up an ial only to get as far as draft up phonology and a dozen words, and then start over again. im hoping that actually recording a conlang down on the internet gives me some motivation to stick with it this time.
with this ial, i wanted it to be what a common denominator might look like between the worlds most spoken languages and language families, so i got a list of about 28 of the most spoken languages. i made a tentative phonology by common denominatoring through these 28 phonological inventories by some process i cant remember the specifics of.
| labial | alveolar | palatal | velar | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| stop | p | t | ch | k |
| nasal | m | n | ||
| liquid | (w) | l | (y) | |
| sibilant | s |
| front | central | back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| high | i | ||
| mid | e | o | |
| low | a |
| a | an | i | in | e | o | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| k | ka | kan | ge | ko | ||
| ch | cha | chan | chi | chin | cho | |
| t | ta | tan | de | to | ||
| n | na | nan | ni | nin | ne | no |
| p | pa | pan | pi | pin | pe | po |
| m | ma | man | mi | min | me | mo |
| l | la | lan | li | lin | le | lo |
| s | sa | san | so |
words can be made up of these syllables, but a word cannot end in n.
all phonemes have a lot of wiggle room for adaptation to peoples native phonological inventories. a e i o can wiggle around so long as they quarter the vowel space nicely (o can get higher and a could go back). the stops can have aspiration or voicing. l can be pronounced as r. the greatest, and most concerning, variation exists for ch, which can be anything from a post alveolar affricate, to a palatal stop, or a sibilant further back from s (but not x hopefully). despite this range, i feel its a worthwhile phoneme, seeing as so many languages from the list distinguish between an s and some more 'chunky' sibiliant or affricate sound. plus its the only thing making this inventory different from toki ponas...
and back to common denominatoring phonological inventories. i remember that i didnt add a u vowel because the u in japanese is too unrounded and can be confused for central vowels in other languages. also chinese phonotactics is fairly restrictive, -en and -on cant work (e and o can be approximated with ə+y and ə+w but only one consonant is allowed in final, so no space left for -n, and also for some reason y/w+ə+n just dont exist?). also spanish and maybe a couple other languages made it difficult for me to keep glides y and w as distinct consonants, as some of these languages 'harden' the glide into a stop or affricate (y to j, w to b) which can get confused with other langauges consonants. so for now, y and w will be represented as a vowel cluster of i- and o-. also, languages like portuguese and tamil have weak final nasals, where historical nasals survive as nasalisation on the vowels that precede them, so i made the rule to not end words in -Vn.
there may be problems with adapting ial words for and from turkish and cantonense. turkish has vowel harmony, so im not sure how to deal with that yet. and cantonese often merges l and n. but i could get around this by simply avoiding having too many words where the only distinction is l vs n. like how toki pona has only a few minimal pairs with e and i and with o and u. i think?