Welcome Jyri,

Recently I tried to create a phonology system (full of allophones) in order
to create words that could be read by anyone in the world and yet
comprehend by any other person.

I tried to avoid features/distinctions that some languages don't have. For
example, I would not use consonantal clusters in the beginning of words
because Finnish lacks them (compare Swedish "franska" with Finnish
"ranska").

But my phonology system became very small.
The vowels:
- Several languages lack tone distinction, so this system would not have
tones;
- Some languages lack stress distinction;
- Marshallese lacks backness distinction;
- If PIE is correct, then there is/was a language with no height
distinction.

This left my phonology system with only one vowel. Assuming PIE had a, it
would have two, like Ubykh.

The consonants:
- Some languages lack voicing distinction;
- Central Rotokas lacks distinction between voiced plosives and
approximants/flaps/fricatives/nasals;
- Hawaiian distincts only two places of articulation for plosives (p and
t~k);
- Pirahã also lacks distinction between voiced plosives and nasals.

Taking into account the statements above, one would deduce that only 2
consonants would be part of this minimal phonology chart. Nevertheless,
every language has at least 2 voiceless sounds (usually plosives) and at
least 2 voiced ones (usually sonorants, but they can be voiced plosives in
languages that lack the voiced plosive/sonorant distinction, e.g. Rotokas
and Pirahã). Therefore, this phonology chart could have up to 4 consonants.


Conclusion: the phonology chart I created was something not very "human".
It had only 2 vowels and 4 consonants (and, of course, several allophones).


On Thu, Mar 14, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Jyri Lehtinen <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I've recently found again my old hobby of conlanging and just joined this
> list. Regaining this hobby means means going through a pile of old ideas
> and trying to build something concrete out of them.
>
> The quickest project to get into an interesting stage has been creating the
> phonology for a language that was originally only meant to be merely a
> phonetic test and a naming language. The idea was to create a language with
> as minimal phonology as possible while still remaining plausible and within
> the borders of naturalism. The system that I've now settled into is /t k ?
> s n/ for consonants and /a o i/ for vowels with high or low surface tones
> on each single vowel. There are also productive lenition processes working
> within the system:
>
> t > s   / V_i
> k > [j] / V_i
> k > [w] / V_o
> ? > [h] / _C,#
> s > [h] / _#
>
> and the vowels /o/ and /i/ can become desyllabic [w] and [j] following the
> sonority hierarchy a > o > i and rules that I haven't pinned down yet. The
> phones [w] and [j] are true allophones of other phonemes.
>
> There's still much to do with the phonotactics and tones and I need to work
> with the sound history to get those right. The language will, however,
> certainly be quite tolerant to vowel sequences (at least those surfacing as
> long vowels and diphthongs) and especially to moderately long consonant
> clusters. /n/ can be surrounded by other consonants and become syllabic.
>
> The system is still a sketch but it's possible to get an idea how it will
> work. Especially including tone feels important in making the phonology
> seem natural. To me this system feels pretty balanced and reasonably stable
> and something that could in principle happen in the real world. On the
> other hand, removing any of the phonemes would make the phonology seem
> unbalanced. This is an interesting result since there shouldn't be any
> attested language with this few phonemes. I've seen one reconstructed
> language (the proto language of the Lakes Plain languages of West Papua)
> that has as few consonant phonemes and looks much less likely. It's
> reconstructed consonant inventory is /p t k b d/ with [w j] being
> allophones of /i u/. If that has been possible, I don't see any reason why
> my system wouldn't be.
>
> So, do you have any thoughts on the plausibility of such minimal systems?
> I'd also like to know if anyone has done any similar experiments than this.
>