blog: reconlangmo 2 - phonology and writing (#142)

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+---
+title: "ReConLangMo 2: Phonology & Writing"
+date: 2020-05-08
+series: reconlangmo
+tags:
+  - conlang
+  - lewa
+---
+
+# ReConLangMo 2: Phonology & Writing
+
+Continuing from [the last post][rclm1], one of the next steps in this process is
+to outline the phonology and basic phonotactics of L'ewa. A language's phonology
+is the set of sounds that are allowed to be in words. The phonotactics of a
+language help people understand where the boundaries between syllables are. I
+will then describe my plans for the L'ewa orthography and how L'ewa is
+romanized. This is a response to the prompt made [here][rclm2prompt].
+
+[rclm1]: https://christine.website/blog/reconlangmo-1-name-ctx-history-2020-05-05
+[rclm2prompt]: https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/gfp3hw/reconlangmo_2_phonology_writing/
+
+## Phonology
+
+I am taking inspiration from Lojban, Esperanto, Mandarin Chinese and English to
+design the phonology of L'ewa. All of the phonology will be defined using the
+[International Phonetic Alphabet][ipa]. If you want to figure out how to
+pronounce these sounds, a lazy trick is to google them. Wikipedia will have a
+perfectly good example to use as a reference. There are two kinds of sounds in
+L'ewa, consonants and vowels.
+
+[ipa]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet
+
+### Consonants
+
+*Consonant inventory*: /d g h j k l m n p q s t w ʃ ʒ ʔ ʙ̥/
+
+| Manner/Place        | Bilabial | Alveolar | Palato-alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Labio-velar | Uvular | Glottal |
+|---------------------|----------|----------|-----------------|---------|-------|-------------|--------|---------|
+| Nasal               | m        | n        |                 |         |       |             |        |         |
+| Stop                | p        | t d      |                 |         | k g   |             | q      | ʔ       |
+| Fricative           |          | s        | ʃ ʒ             |         |       |             |        | h       |
+| Approximant         |          |          |                 | j       |       | w           |        |         |
+| Trill               | ʙ̥        |          |                 |         |       |             |        |         |
+| Lateral approximant |          | l        |                 |         |       |             |        |         |
+
+The weirdest consonant is /ʙ̥/, which is a voiceless bilabial trill, or blowing
+air through your lips without making sound. This is intended to imitate a noise
+an orca would make.
+
+### Vowels
+
+*Vowel inventory*: /a ɛ i o u/
+
+*Diphthongs*: au, oi, ua, ue, uo, ai, ɛi
+
+|          | Front | Back |
+|----------|-------|------|
+| High     | i     | u    |
+| High-mid |       | o    |
+| Low-mid  | ɛ     |      |
+| Low      | a     |      |
+
+## Phonotactics
+
+I plan to have two main kinds of words in L'ewa. I plan to have content and
+particle words. The content words will refer to things, properties, or actions
+(such as `tool`, `red`, `run`) and the particle words will change how the
+grammar of a sentence works (such as `the` or prepositions).
+
+The main kind of content word is a root word, and they will be in the following
+forms:
+
+- CVCCV (/ʒa.sko/)
+- CCVCV (/lʔ.ɛwa/)
+
+Particles will mostly fall into the following forms:
+
+- V (/a/)
+- VV (/ai/)
+- CV (/ba/)
+- CVV (/bai/)
+
+Proper names _should_ end with consonants, but there is no hard requirement.
+
+L'ewa is a stressed language, with stress on the second-to-last (penultimate)
+syllable. For example, the word "[zh]asko" would be pronounced "[ZH]Asko".
+
+Syllables end on stop consonants if one is present in a consonant cluster. Two
+stop consonants cannot follow eachother in a row. 
+
+## Writing
+
+I haven't completely fleshed this part out yet, but I want the writing system of
+L'ewa to be an [abugida][abugida]. This is a kind of written script that has the
+consonants make the larger shapes but the vowels are small diacritics over the
+consonants. If the word creation process is done right, you can actually omit
+the vowels entirely if they are not relevant.
+
+[abugida]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abugida
+
+I plan to have this script be written by hand with pencils/pen and typed into
+computers, just like English. This script will also be a left-to-right script
+like English.
+
+## Romanisation
+
+L'ewa's romanization is intentionally simple. Most of the IPA letters keep their
+letters, but the ones that do not match to Latin letters are listed below:
+
+| Pronunciation | Spelling |
+|---------------|----------|
+| /j/           | *y*      |
+| /ɛ/           | *e*      |
+| /ʃ/           | *x*      |
+| /ʒ/           | *z*      |
+| /ʔ/           | *'*      |
+| /ʙ̥/          | *b*      |
+
+This is designed to make every letter typeable on a standard US keyboard, as
+well as mapping as many letters as possible on the home row of a QWERTY
+keyboard.
+
+---
+
+I am still working on the tooling for word creation and the like. I plan to use
+the [Swaedish lists][swaedish] (this site is having certificate issues at the
+time of writing this post) to help guide the creation of a base vocabulary. I
+will go into more detail in the future.
+
+[swaedish]: https://cals.info/word/list/