Phonemes for Azoi

[/nɒtɛndəduːd/]

today, I finished the phonetic alphabet for my newest/oldest conlang, Azoi. this may seem like a small feat, but Azoi is based on the 3+ years of "conlanging" I did for my to-be-named fantasy conworld before I knew anything about actual conlanging, and of course I never documented any of the phonemes, so I had to go through 3+ years of files and scratch paper full of random gibberish and after a long day, I finally pinned down all the phonemes I used. here they are:

/p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /c/, /k/, /m/, /n/, /ɲ/, /ŋ/, /ⱱ/, /ɾ/, /ɸ/, /v/, /θ/, /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, /ç/, /h/, /ɬ/, /ɹ/, /j/, /w/, /l/, /ʎ/.

/i/, /u/, /ɪ/, /ʊ/, /e/, /o/, /ə/, /ɛ/, /æ/, /a/, /ɑ/.

not exactly sure how I knew about some of the consonants, like /ɬ/ and /ʎ/, while I can barely pronounce them to date, or why I felt the need for both /ɾ/ and /ɹ/, but then again, I didn't know much at the time. thoughts/suggestions? next up is romanization.

[bradrn]

Welcome to the board /nɑtɛndəːduːd/!

today, I finished the phonetic alphabet for my newest/oldest conlang, Azoi. this may seem like a small feat, but Azoi is based on the 3+ years of "conlanging" I did for my to-be-named fantasy conworld before I knew anything about actual conlanging, and of course I never documented any of the phonemes, so I had to go through 3+ years of files and scratch paper full of random gibberish and after a long day, I finally pinned down all the phonemes I used. here they are:

/p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /c/, /k/, /m/, /n/, /ɲ/, /ŋ/, /ⱱ/, /ɾ/, /ɸ/, /v/, /θ/, /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, /ç/, /h/, /ɬ/, /ɹ/, /j/, /w/, /l/, /ʎ/.

/i/, /u/, /ɪ/, /ʊ/, /e/, /o/, /ə/, /ɛ/, /æ/, /a/, /ɑ/.

Let me reformat this as a table so it’s easier to read:

	Bilabial	Alveolar	Postalveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m	n		ɲ	ŋ
Stop	p b	t d		c	k
Fricative	ɸ	s z ɬ	ʃ	ç		h
Approximant		ɹ l		j ʎ
Tap/flap	ⱱ	ɾ

i		u
ɪ		ʊ
e		o
ɛ	ə
æ	a	ɑ

not exactly sure how I knew about some of the consonants, like /ɬ/ and /ʎ/, while I can barely pronounce them to date, or why I felt the need for both /ɾ/ and /ɹ/, but then again, I didn't know much at the time. thoughts/suggestions?

What sticks out to me firstly is the extreme asymmetry of the consonantal system: a voicing distinction only for /p t s/, /ɸ ⱱ/ but no /f v/, five palatals /ɲ c ç j ʎ/ but only two velars /ŋ k/, voiceless fricatives for every place of articulation except /χ/, and so on. None of this is bad at all, but it’s good to be sure that it’s what you want, rather than doing it for no reason because you didn’t realise that it was the case.

For the vowels, what I notice first is that you have five constrastive levels of height. That’s pretty uncommon in natlangs. What’s even more unusual is that the low vowels contrast more levels of backness than the high vowels. I’d expect this vowel system to be fairly unstable, quickly turning into something typologically more common. The simplest possibility would be for the front vowels to raise, perhaps something like /ɛ e ɪ i/ → /e ɪ i ɨ/, but for something like this there’s endless ways it could work out. (The vowel set already suggests a former */ɔ/→/ə/.)

[Ares Land]

Welcome to the board!

[Lērisama]

Again, welcome. I believe it is traditional to offer pickles and tea¹, but I can't find the customary pictures right now.

Edit: here they are:
Edit edit: no, that didn't work
Edit edit edit: the traditional tea image seems to have suffered from linkrot, but here are the pickles:

¹ No idea why

[Travis B.]

Welcome!

I would say that the only unnaturalistic thing about this inventory is the three-way frontness/backness distinction in the low vowels, which is very rare in natlangs without an accompanying distinction such as vowel length or roundness, particularly since there is little vowel space available for such a distinction since the vowel space of the mouth is roughly triangular.

[/nɒtɛndəduːd/]

Welcome to the board /nɑtɛndəːduːd/!

Welcome to the board!

Again, welcome. I believe it is traditional to offer pickles and tea¹, but I can't find the customary pictures right now.

Edit: here they are:
Edit edit: no, that didn't work
Edit edit edit: the traditional tea image seems to have suffered from linkrot, but here are the pickles:

Welcome!

Let me first thank you all for welcoming me! I will be sure to enjoy some pickles and tea asap.

What sticks out to me firstly is the extreme asymmetry of the consonantal system: a voicing distinction only for /p t s/, /ɸ ⱱ/ but no /f v/, five palatals /ɲ c ç j ʎ/ but only two velars /ŋ k/, voiceless fricatives for every place of articulation except /χ/, and so on. None of this is bad at all, but it’s good to be sure that it’s what you want, rather than doing it for no reason because you didn’t realise that it was the case.

For the vowels, what I notice first is that you have five constrastive levels of height. That’s pretty uncommon in natlangs. What’s even more unusual is that the low vowels contrast more levels of backness than the high vowels. I’d expect this vowel system to be fairly unstable, quickly turning into something typologically more common. The simplest possibility would be for the front vowels to raise, perhaps something like /ɛ e ɪ i/ → /e ɪ i ɨ/, but for something like this there’s endless ways it could work out. (The vowel set already suggests a former */ɔ/→/ə/.)

I have no idea how to work the code for charts and whatnot here, so I apologize if my posts seem a bit messy.

I agree that the consonants feel a bit off, but I’d like this conlang to be able to encompass all that conlanging I did when I first came up with the idea for Azoi until now. So let’s say that we add the regular /f/ and /v/, along with voiced versions for most, if not all of the consonants where a voiced version is possible. Or perhaps not all of them, just the ones where the IPA deems important enough to list, because it seems like there are a lot of sounds that ipachart.com doesn’t list. Anyways, I feel that when I was beginning Azoi I had it in mind to be without very many sounds further back than velar, so /x/ and /ɣ/ are ok, but I find /χ/ too rough of a sound anyways.

As for vowels, I’d like to find a way to keep the /ɛ/ but but do all the rest of that, what with the shift in vowels and whatnot. Perhaps I could remove /e/ and add /ɨ/?

Any other suggestions?

[alice]

Welcome to the ZBB!

As for vowels, I’d like to find a way to keep the /ɛ/ but but do all the rest of that, what with the shift in vowels and whatnot. Perhaps I could remove /e/ and add /ɨ/?

Any other suggestions?

You could group the vowels into parallel tense and lax systems, so that for example /i e u o/ are paired with /ɪ ɛ ʊ ɑ/ respectively. This would mean introducing a rule which governs the distribution of each type of vowel - for example, lax vowels are only allowed in closed syllables - and perhaps another which replaces a lax vowel with its tense equivalent (oe the other way around) in certain environments. You have eleven vowels, so perhaps one tense vowel could correspond to two lax ones, or vice versa.

[Travis B.]

Welcome to the ZBB!

As for vowels, I’d like to find a way to keep the /ɛ/ but but do all the rest of that, what with the shift in vowels and whatnot. Perhaps I could remove /e/ and add /ɨ/?

Any other suggestions?

You could group the vowels into parallel tense and lax systems, so that for example /i e u o/ are paired with /ɪ ɛ ʊ ɑ/ respectively. This would mean introducing a rule which governs the distribution of each type of vowel - for example, lax vowels are only allowed in closed syllables - and perhaps another which replaces a lax vowel with its tense equivalent (oe the other way around) in certain environments. You have eleven vowels, so perhaps one tense vowel could correspond to two lax ones, or vice versa.

Note that an extremely common type of this in some languages, particularly many African languages, is advanced tongue root (ATR) harmony. In its most extensive form it generally takes the form of /i e a o u/ being paired with /ɪ ɛ ɐ ɔ ʊ/ (or like) where vowels in a word are required to all be of one set or the other, and where affixes often have two forms, one with vowels in the first set and one with vowels int he second set.

[/nɒtɛndəduːd/]

Welcome to the ZBB!

Again, thank you for the warm welcome!

You could group the vowels into parallel tense and lax systems, so that for example /i e u o/ are paired with /ɪ ɛ ʊ ɑ/ respectively. This would mean introducing a rule which governs the distribution of each type of vowel - for example, lax vowels are only allowed in closed syllables - and perhaps another which replaces a lax vowel with its tense equivalent (oe the other way around) in certain environments. You have eleven vowels, so perhaps one tense vowel could correspond to two lax ones, or vice versa.

I love this idea! How would I come up with a set of naturalistic rules that govern it though? Naturally, in a natlang like Azoi happens to be, you’d have to create a timeline of natural changes that happen to it over time, and that can be a bit confusing and I’m not exactly at that point yet, but lets just say that at some point, perhaps really early on or whenever people started speaking less like cavemen and more like sophisticated people, people started using the unstressed vowels instead of the stressed vowels. Would that work at all, or should I come up with a more realistic explanation? Also, how would that tie back into the stressed vowels?

Also for reference, let’s say that the stressed and unstressed vowels relate to each other like so:

stressed = unstressed
/i/ = /ɪ/
/u/ = /ʊ/
/e/ = /ɛ/
/o/ = /o/
/a/ = /æ/ and /ɑ/
/i u e o a/ = /ə/

(my apologies for the makeshift table, I don’t know how to make an actual one)

Please let me know what you think I should do!

[bradrn]

I would say that the only unnaturalistic thing about this inventory is the three-way frontness/backness distinction in the low vowels, which is very rare in natlangs without an accompanying distinction such as vowel length or roundness, particularly since there is little vowel space available for such a distinction since the vowel space of the mouth is roughly triangular.

I was going to mention that English has it, but English has it with a length distinction — TRAP and STRUT are short while PALM is long. But there’s probably some dialect somewhere where all three vowels are short.

[…] perhaps really early on or whenever people started speaking less like cavemen and more like sophisticated people […]

This kind of thing is a very common misconception, but it’s not actually how languages evolve. There are no ‘more sophisticated’ or ‘less sophisticated’ languages — all languages, as far as we can tell, are more or less equally sophisticated. In fact, if there are any languages which are more complex than any other, they would be the languages of small tribal societies, which often turn out to have immensely elaborate structures.

For more on how this can be, I strongly recommend Guy Deutscher’s book The Unfolding of Language. (Or of course zompist’s Language Construction Kit, but that’s less focussed on this specific topic.)

Also for reference, let’s say that the stressed and unstressed vowels relate to each other like so:

stressed = unstressed
/i/ = /ɪ/
/u/ = /ʊ/
/e/ = /ɛ/
/o/ = /o/
/a/ = /æ/ and /ɑ/
/i u e o a/ = /ə/

Yes, something like this seems reasonable, except you’d generally want to establish conditioning factors — it’s not just random choice. So e.g., when does /a/ become /æ/, when does it become /ɑ/, and when does it become /ə/?

[/nɒtɛndəduːd/]

[…] perhaps really early on or whenever people started speaking less like cavemen and more like sophisticated people […]

This kind of thing is a very common misconception, but it’s not actually how languages evolve. There are no ‘more sophisticated’ or ‘less sophisticated’ languages — all languages, as far as we can tell, are more or less equally sophisticated. In fact, if there are any languages which are more complex than any other, they would be the languages of small tribal societies, which often turn out to have immensely elaborate structures.

I meant less all languages and more simply just Azoi itself. Y’know, that time in really really early history when language started being used more for simple conversation and less for describing events? Or am I making that up in my mind? Anywhom, that’s what I was meaning to refer to.

Also for reference, let’s say that the stressed and unstressed vowels relate to each other like so:

stressed = unstressed
/i/ = /ɪ/
/u/ = /ʊ/
/e/ = /ɛ/
/o/ = /o/
/a/ = /æ/ and /ɑ/
/i u e o a/ = /ə/

Yes, something like this seems reasonable, except you’d generally want to establish conditioning factors — it’s not just random choice. So e.g., when does /a/ become /æ/, when does it become /ɑ/, and when does it become /ə/?

For this, I’d imagine that /a/ can become /æ/ under most circumstances and /ɑ/ when it precedes or follows a fricative or another vowel. Also, /i u e o a/ becoming /ə/ feels like it could and should be more of a loose thing, /ə/ being the most neutral vowel and all that. However, as a general rule of thumb, let’s say that perhaps any unstressed vowel used in the ‘unstressed’ set of vowels can be pronounced as /ə/ and can still be interpreted that way. Does this make enough logical sense to be considered natural?

Moving onwards, what I’d like now is to try out a romanization/orthography(probably just romanization) system, specifically one that somewhat prefers the aesthetic and vibe over the pronounceability, though still readable for someone who only reads English. Probably mostly diacritics, although I’d like a fair number of digraphs, too. For an example of this, here are a few ideas I have:

/ɬ/ = <ś>
/ʎ/ = <ý>
/ⱱ/ = <v̇>
/ɾ/ = <ṙ>
(in Azoi, i’ve got the idea that the acute represents flicking or touching the roof of your mouth with your tongue, while the dot above represents tapping/flapping the consonant)

And again, for reference, here is a list of all the phonemes Azoi uses.

consonants: /p b t d c ɟ k m n ɲ ŋ ⱱ ɾ ɸ f v θ s z ʃ ʒ ç ʝ x ɬ ɹ j w l ʎ/
vowels: /i u ɪ ʊ e o ɛ æ a ɑ/

Let me know how you think I should romanize these!

[bradrn]

Y’know, that time in really really early history when language started being used more for simple conversation and less for describing events?

No I don’t, because if that ever did happen, it would have been way, way too far in the past to be accessible by any linguistic techniques. Or language could have evolved in a completely different way to this. We just have no idea whatsoever. All we can tell is that the oldest protolanguages we can reconstruct seem to be essentially similar to modern languages in their structure.

Also, /i u e o a/ becoming /ə/ feels like it could and should be more of a loose thing, /ə/ being the most neutral vowel and all that.

What do you mean by a ‘loose thing’? That it occurs in free variation with the other unstressed correspondent?

consonants: /p b t d c ɟ k m n ɲ ŋ ⱱ ɾ ɸ f v θ s z ʃ ʒ ç ʝ x ɬ ɹ j w l ʎ/
vowels: /i u ɪ ʊ e o ɛ æ a ɑ/

Let me know how you think I should romanize these!

Note that we have a Romanization Challenge Thread for such things.

[Lērisama]

More: show

natlang like Azoi

Obligatory typo service: not that it really matters, but I think you meant conlang here, since Azoi is not a natural language, and it bugged me enough to mention it.

About the schwa, perhaps you mean secondary stress¹. If your native language is English⁴, your intuition on where to reduce to a schwa and when to not it probably based on where you put the secondary stress in such words. If you do this, then you would have to work out where Azoi tends to put secondary stress, only partially reduce those vowels⁵, and fully reduce⁶ the rest

¹ Secondary strees is like main (primary) stress, except you can have more than one per word², it tends to be more regular – I don't know a language that contrasts different locations of secondary stress, and many have rules on where it goes³
² Usually once per foot
³ Often not unbreakable rules, strong tendencies may be better for some languages.
⁴Apologies if it isn't
⁵ i.e. to the /ɪ ʊ ɛ ɔ æ ɑ/ set
⁶ i.e. to schwa

[/nɒtɛndəduːd/]

Y’know, that time in really really early history when language started being used more for simple conversation and less for describing events?

No I don’t, because if that ever did happen, it would have been way, way too far in the past to be accessible by any linguistic techniques. Or language could have evolved in a completely different way to this. We just have no idea whatsoever. All we can tell is that the oldest protolanguages we can reconstruct seem to be essentially similar to modern languages in their structure.

Okay, well let's just say that that's how languages evolved in the world where Azoi is used. From here forward, let’s assume that anything controversial I might say applies to Azoi and only Azoi. Assuming this, Azoi has to be a really old language, thus requiring a really long timeline of natural changes applied to it.

natlang like Azoi

Obligatory typo service: not that it really matters, but I think you meant conlang here, since Azoi is not a natural language, and it bugged me enough to mention it.

Yes, my apologies. I should’ve said ‘conlang’ here, I must have had a brainfart. I suppose I was trying to refer to the idea that Azoi is an artlang that mimics being natural.

About the schwa, perhaps you mean secondary stress¹. If your native language is English⁴, your intuition on where to reduce to a schwa and when to not it probably based on where you put the secondary stress in such words. If you do this, then you would have to work out where Azoi tends to put secondary stress, only partially reduce those vowels⁵, and fully reduce⁶ the rest

¹ Secondary strees is like main (primary) stress, except you can have more than one per word², it tends to be more regular – I don't know a language that contrasts different locations of secondary stress, and many have rules on where it goes³
² Usually once per foot
³ Often not unbreakable rules, strong tendencies may be better for some languages.
⁴Apologies if it isn't
⁵ i.e. to the /ɪ ʊ ɛ ɔ æ ɑ/ set
⁶ i.e. to schwa

As for the schwa, yes, I suppose that in part that’s what I’m referring to, that is if secondary stress is what causes some vowels in English to be reduced to the schwa sound, /ə/. I don’t really know anything about secondary stress, however, so how might I go about such a thing?

consonants: /p b t d c ɟ k m n ɲ ŋ ⱱ ɾ ɸ f v θ s z ʃ ʒ ç ʝ x ɬ ɹ j w l ʎ/
vowels: /i u ɪ ʊ e o ɛ æ a ɑ/

Let me know how you think I should romanize these!

Note that we have a Romanization Challenge Thread for such things.

Forgive me if I’m misunderstanding, but isn’t the Romanization Challenge Thread for challenging others to see how they might go about romanizing a challenging set of phonemes? And anyways, being new to the board, I’d like to have a scratchboard/help board specifically for Azoi, that way any posts I make and any responses to my posts are easy to find, because I am indeed new to the board and thus don’t know how to navigate very well about it. Would it then be customary for me to make said scratchboard/help board, or could I continue using this one?

[Travis B.]

Also for reference, let’s say that the stressed and unstressed vowels relate to each other like so:

stressed = unstressed
/i/ = /ɪ/
/u/ = /ʊ/
/e/ = /ɛ/
/o/ = /o/
/a/ = /æ/ and /ɑ/
/i u e o a/ = /ə/

(my apologies for the makeshift table, I don’t know how to make an actual one)

Please let me know what you think I should do!

One thing to note, though, is that in unstressed syllables cross-linguistically vowels tend to be fewer in distinctions and more centralized, so I would expect /æ/ and /ɑ/ to be separate vowels in stressed syllables, and to merge as [a] in unstressed syllables rather than the opposite.

[Travis B.]

I would say that the only unnaturalistic thing about this inventory is the three-way frontness/backness distinction in the low vowels, which is very rare in natlangs without an accompanying distinction such as vowel length or roundness, particularly since there is little vowel space available for such a distinction since the vowel space of the mouth is roughly triangular.

I was going to mention that English has it, but English has it with a length distinction — TRAP and STRUT are short while PALM is long. But there’s probably some dialect somewhere where all three vowels are short.

North American English has a three-way distinction without rounding or length between TRAP/BATH, FATHER/PALM/LOT (or just FATHER/PALM in the case of ENE dialects which merge LOT with THOUGHT without merging FATHER/PALM with LOT), and STRUT, but it has a clear height and often dipthongization distinction for them -- e.g. GA has [æ~ɛə*~eɪ/e̞** ɑ ɐ] while Inland North dialects typically have [ɛə~eɪ/e̞** a ʌ] (I personally have [ɛ~ɛə*~e̞**~æ***~e̞ə**** a ʌ~ɐ***] myself).

* before nasals other than /ŋ/
** before /ŋ/
*** before /d/
**** before /g/

[Travis B.]

Also for reference, let’s say that the stressed and unstressed vowels relate to each other like so:

stressed = unstressed
/i/ = /ɪ/
/u/ = /ʊ/
/e/ = /ɛ/
/o/ = /o/
/a/ = /æ/ and /ɑ/
/i u e o a/ = /ə/

(my apologies for the makeshift table, I don’t know how to make an actual one)

Please let me know what you think I should do!

One thing to note, though, is that in unstressed syllables cross-linguistically vowels tend to be fewer in distinctions and more centralized, so I would expect /æ/ and /ɑ/ to be separate vowels in stressed syllables, and to merge as [a] in unstressed syllables rather than the opposite.

Also, I should note that a regular correspondance between two different phones in which a word contrast cannot be formed is allophony. For instance, in your system here all the cases where two vowels in different environments (e.g. stressed versus unstressed, adjacent to different other phonemes) where the correspondance is regular would normally be considered allophones of the same vowel. The primary reason to consider, say, /i/ a separate vowel phoneme from /ɪ/ and /ə/ is if the relationship between [ɪ] and [ə] is not regular (i.e. which is found in each word is not predictable), so a regular relationship between them and [i] cannot be formed.

[keenir]

A belated greetings and hello to you. Have some more tea.
(i have no pickles, so i can't offer you any; sorry)

[Travis B.]

Note, however, that [ə] may be a shared, neutralized allophone of multiple stressed phonemes if there is mobile stress, such that the same phoneme may receive or not receive stress in differently morphologically-related words. Then, positing a /ə/ phoneme is only necessary if there are constituent syllables of morphemes in which it never receives stress. (This is the case in English, for instance, where while reduction to [ə] with mobile stress is found, there are constituent syllables of morphemes that never receive stress, requiring a /ə/ phoneme.)

[bradrn]

Y’know, that time in really really early history when language started being used more for simple conversation and less for describing events?

No I don’t, because if that ever did happen, it would have been way, way too far in the past to be accessible by any linguistic techniques. Or language could have evolved in a completely different way to this. We just have no idea whatsoever. All we can tell is that the oldest protolanguages we can reconstruct seem to be essentially similar to modern languages in their structure.

Okay, well let's just say that that's how languages evolved in the world where Azoi is used. From here forward, let’s assume that anything controversial I might say applies to Azoi and only Azoi. Assuming this, Azoi has to be a really old language, thus requiring a really long timeline of natural changes applied to it.

natlang like Azoi

Obligatory typo service: not that it really matters, but I think you meant conlang here, since Azoi is not a natural language, and it bugged me enough to mention it.

Yes, my apologies. I should’ve said ‘conlang’ here, I must have had a brainfart. I suppose I was trying to refer to the idea that Azoi is an artlang that mimics being natural.

To me these statements seem contradictory. If you want Azoi to be naturalistic, it would make sense to give it a history similar to that known from natlangs. And if you want Azoi to have a different history, such that it evolved (comparatively) recently from pre-language, then I feel that that would logically lead to it having some differences to the languages we know of on Earth. But I don’t see how it makes sense to give it an unnaturalistic history yet expect it to end up similar to natural languages.

[EDIT: rereading, the first version of this post came out harsher than I intended, sorry; have toned it down a bit]