Phonology

This should be a steady post. I post it now because I'm sick of using Lojban's FA tags when giving examples for my language. I need words, and for that I need phonemes, phonotactic rules and a writing system.

Ideally, the writing system would be Shwa (used phonemically, because things like assimilation are optional, and can vary between speakers). However, a romanisation scheme is needed. That is all I'll document here; Shwa and IPA substitutions should be obvious. Here are the consonants:

	Labial	Coronal	Dorsal	Glottal
Plosive	p b	t d	k g	.
Fricative	f	s z	h	(h)
Nasal	m	n	r
Approximant	w	l	j

There are a few sticking points. Firstly, ‘r’ represents /ŋ/. This is just an ASCIIism derived from the shape of the lowercase letter (‘m’ → ‘n’ → ‘r’). I want newcomers to be able to write in the language without having to fiddle with their keyboard layout (though it is fun).

Then, there are the glottal consonants. ‘.’ is almost exactly the same as ‘.’ in Lojban. Notably, the dotside conventions for cmevla carry over as expected. With ‘h’, I decided to stick to the convention of many natural languages, which tend to have either /x/ or /h/, but not both. In Lojban, they're roughly in complementary distribution anyway. Instead of using Lojban's ‘'’, I use approximants to join vowels. It's your choice which of [x] and [h] you want to use, and you can mix them in your speech. Even English speakers may prefer [x] in certain circumstances.

The final thing to mention is about approximants. Unlike Lojban, I use on-glides regularly, so distinguishing between vowels and semivowels becomes necessary. Also, it should be noted that the approximants' positions on the chart are more to make the abstractions work, rather than to give phonetic information. ‘w’ and ‘j’ are the semivowels of ‘u’ and ‘i’, respectively. ‘l’ is any lateral or rhotic.

Now, the vowels:

	Front	Central	Back
Close	i		u
Mid	e	y	o
Open		a

These are essentially the vowels of Lojban, and serve similar purposes. ‘y’ represents the schwa, which is morphologically distinct from the other vowels. In an IPAisation, it can be written as ‘ə’, but you may also want to change ‘e’ and ‘o’ to ‘ɛ’ and ‘ɔ’ to avoid them looking too similar.

The order of the vowels is “oiaue”. Tracing this out makes a star shape, thus guaranteeing maximum phonetic distance between vowels close in that sequence. The subsequence “iau” is also used (as it is in Lojban). You may or may not have noticed that the various classes of phonemes have different numbers of phonemes each. For instance, there are 3 approximants, 4 fricatives, 5 vowels and 6 plosives. These can come together to make sequences of semantically similar cmavo.

Where the Latin alphabet needs to be transcribed (like when using ISO 3166-1 codes for countries), the code letters are usually given sounds based on the ASCII orthography. I'll have to go into the morphology before describing this system, though. I will cover morphology and phonotactics soon, in that order.