Goal: Choose “series” of consonants to incorporate
Note: The series you’re choosing from are the columns and rows of the IPA consonant chart.
Tip: Familiarize yourself with all the sounds first, and remember that these consonants are a starting point.
Work focus: Organize/Plan/Structure
Today is the first step of working on the language itself—on the features you will incorporate into the language. The upcoming prompts over the next month or so will guide you through decisions for evolving the sounds of your language, which means you will start by creating the earliest form of your language, called a proto-language. Proto-forms in linguistics refer to the oldest known or oldest reconstructed forms of a language. For example, if you look up the etymology of the English word “cow,” you will see that, in Middle English, the word was cou and, before that, occurred as cū in Old English texts. The word has a history even older than that, though.
By comparing forms of the word for “cow” across other Germanic languages (e.g. German Kuh, Swedish ko, Icelandic kýr), linguists have reconstructed the form *kūz “cow” for an early language form that we call Proto-Germanic. In other words, a very long time ago, this Proto-Germanic language was believed to be spoken by at least one speaking community, and speakers used a word like kūz to refer to a cow. Over time, that speaking community spread and dispersed, and the language spoken in each community that spread out began developing different features. As the sounds, vocabulary, and grammatical features shifted, the languages spoken in those spread-out communities shifted to modern-day Germanic languages, including English, German, Dutch, Norwegian, and Danish.
That particular word is even older than its Proto-Germanic form, though. Through a lot of comparative analyses, linguists have reconstructed the form *gʷṓws (“cow”) for a very old language form called Proto-Indo-European (PIE). PIE is the oldest reconstructed form of a language that gave rise to hundreds of modern-day languages, including the Germanic languages, Romance languages (e.g. Spanish, French, Italian), and Slavic languages (e.g. Russian, Polish). The words for “cow” in other Indo-European languages are cognate with the English form—cognates are words that can be traced back to a single origin, or words that share a historical form. Cognates of cow include Latin bōs, Persian gâv, Latvian govs, Serbo-Croatian govedo, and Armenian kov.
When you use a historical process in conlanging, you create the earliest form of your language and then create changes to apply to those forms, which can shift the sounds, words, and grammar of the language to provide a more “modern” form of the language.
This week, you are tasked with selecting a beginning set of sounds for your language. Later, you will make decisions about how those sounds will shift within particular contexts. That means that whatever sounds you choose now may or may not be in the final form of your language. A general piece of advice I give conlangers of all levels is to start with a more modest sound inventory and then see how the inventory is affected (which may mean growing the inventory) as you select sound changes.
Today’s prompt requires you to consider the pulmonic consonants included in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), which is a general transcription system used by linguists to describe the sounds of natural languages. You can download a copy of the full IPA here on the IPA website. That link takes you to a downloadable PDF that includes all the sounds linguists have documented in natural languages (note that other linguistic sounds are theoretically possible in human languages and non-human speakers may have different ranges of capabilities).
One adjustment I suggest making to this IPA chart is adding the [w] to the bilabial column. It is technically a sound that requires two points of articulation, so it is listed in a different section on the full IPA chart. However, it is a common sound of natural languages, and many descriptions of languages include the [w] as a bilabial sound based on its use and patterning in languages.
If you are a beginning conlanger, I highly encourage you to give your speakers a human vocal tract, regardless of whether they are human or human-like themselves. Giving them the same vocal tracts as humans means you can work with the sounds already identified and described by linguists. If you are a more advanced conlanger, you may choose to develop your own system of sounds that are possible for your speakers, given their biology and vocal apparatuses. If you are going with that route, you can loosely apply the upcoming prompts to your process rather than relying on the IPA charts. Just remember that creating non-human sounds may mean human speakers will not be able to speak your language (including you).
Today’s focus specifically asks you to select the series of pulmonic consonants you’re most interested in including in the starting sound inventory of your language. The pulmonic consonants are those that are produced with an airstream beginning in the lungs, and sound is produced as air is released (or expelled) out of the body.
If you are unfamiliar with the IPA (or with parts of the IPA), you should first familiarize yourself with the sounds before making any major decisions. You can use an interactive chart (e.g. this interactive chart) to play sound files associated with each IPA character so you get a better sense of how each one sounds.
Within the chart of pulmonic consonants (the top chart on the downloadable PDF in the link above), the columns represent placement, or where the consonant sounds are produced. In natural languages, the alveolar ridge is the most prominent placement; that is, nearly all (if not all) languages include sounds at that particular placement, and languages tend to have more alveolar sounds in their inventory than sounds produced in any other area.
The rows of the IPA chart represent manner, or how the sounds are produced. Of those rows, stops (plosives), fricatives, and nasals are the most commonly found in natural languages. If you are going for a naturalistic Earth-based humanoid language, I encourage you to start with the alveolar column, and the stop (plosive), fricative, and nasal rows. From there, you will decide what other columns and rows to keep and which ones to remove from the starting inventory.
You don’t need to finalize the individual consonants within those series quite yet—focus on identifying what rows and columns from the IPA chart you will keep in your starting inventory of pulmonic consonants.
As a first step in the sound selection process, you should make a “working IPA chart” for your language, where you list all the possible sounds within the series you’ve selected. That is, remove any columns or rows (along with their sounds) from your chart so you are focused on the sounds you are most interested in including. Not all of these sounds will necessarily make the cut as you continue considering aspects of your starting sound inventory, so the chart you create today is truly just a starting point for future decisions!