luvibgi

my first conlang is a reflection of my first foray into amateur linguistics and wikipedia rabbit holes. one of those rabbit holes was basic phonology, apparently realising that seemingly unrelated consonants differed just in vocal chord activation was amazing to me. as a result, the conlangs phonology trends a little symmetric.

also, my whole foray into linguistics was sparked by my interest in russian at the time, so the infamous velar fricative got put in, along with a paradigm of nucleus formation that involves a vowel being optionally flanked by glides. that comes from me interpretting the soft and hard vowels of the russian alphabet more literally than the actual russian phonology behind them. after some time, i got into georgian and caucasian phonology, so i put both ejectives in as well.

the conlang also had a distinction between a dental and retroflex series, as i was also influenced by hindi phonology. in this new iteration however, i uncurl the retroflexes into a simpler alveolar or post aleolar series. for me being familiar with south asian languages, retroflexes are too distinctly south asian and bring me back into the real world, something that the other phonological aspects dont do since they are more foreign to me. while retroflexes are gone, the distinction between two series remains, with one being dental, and the other being apical, maybe alveolar or post alveolar.

the tables above use a tentative romanisation with row and column labels that might not best reflect specific phonetic values. the vowels are more or less fine, maybe the language will have some allophones. but like for the consonants, the labial fricatives are actually labiodental, and the labial approximant is labiovelar. the laminal series is mostly dental, except the sibilants are alveolar, but the lateral i dont care about too much it can be alveolar or dental. the apical series is mostly alveolar, but the sibilants are post alveolar. so i guess all the four sibilants move down the mouth a bit. the rhotic stays alveolar, and is a tap. i like voicing the h, but i want to keep it up in the air for now.

the tentative romanisation is just a quick system i wrote down right now that makes sense to my american englishy brain. it is a little different from my original one, which had capital letters for apicals and some other consonants, very clunky. i also made transliterations in cyrillic, devnagri, and nastaliq because of my interest in russian and hindi/hindustani at the time. those are more or less unchanged.