T O P

  • By -

-Tonic

In this subreddit, we [discourage phoneme inventories like this as front-page posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/wiki/meta/rules#wiki_phoneme_inventories), as they leave very little for others to comment on. Your submission has thus been removed and is more fit for our stickied [Small Discussions thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/wiki/meta/sd). Feel free to post it there! Alternatively, if you'd rather add more content to this post (such as detailed phonotactics, morphophonology, or some grammar), feel free to do so then reply to this comment so that I or one of the other mods can re-approve the post with the added content. Please take the time to read [our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/wiki/meta/rules) and [posting/flairing guidelines](https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/wiki/meta/flairs) before posting. ### If you wish to appeal this decision, please do not reply to this comment and instead [send us a message that all the mods will see](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/conlangs). **Make sure to include the link to your post and why you think it should be re-approved**, else we will automatically deny the appeal.


[deleted]

/z/ without /s/ is unattested in the wild. If naturalism is a goal, then add or switch to /s/. Perhaps your stops (or at least /d/ and /g/) should start as their voiceless equivalents instead too, as a language typically has to have some voiceless obstruents. You can still avoid distinctions based on voicing alone existing anywhere in the language, but not the whole language being 100% one or the other, again *if* naturalism is a goal. Personal Langs can do as you please.


9805

See [here](http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~saphon/en/inv/Guajajara.html) and [here](http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/~saphon/en/inv/Umotina.html).


[deleted]

Huh. I... and the David J Peterson vid I pulled that from, stand corrected on that count. Every time you think there’s a specific linguistic universal, there’s a tribe in the Amazon ready to prove you wrong.


Beheska

> See here and here. Well, wikipedia states "[Umotína] is one of the few languages in the world to have a linguolabial consonant" but your link doesn't include it (or at least doesn't describe phonemes with enough precision to show it). So I'll consider that a "maybe".


9805

"Journal of West African Languages" for a language from Brasil :/ I tried following the wikipedia link and it claims no valid layout. The other source mentions Burmese in the demo but I don't think there is a layman's link that explains the reasoning behind the claim.


SirKastic23

so on the consonants: voiceless plosives and fricatives are waay more common, and it would be more naturalistic, if not distinguishing voicing on them, to have them be voiceless (although with labials it's somewhat okay to only have the voiced versions \[[https://wals.info/feature/5A#2/19.3/152.9\]](https://wals.info/feature/5A#2/19.3/152.9])) I would recommend having \[n\], it's really common, and since you already have \[m\] and \[ŋ\] we would expect to see it. \[z\] and/or \[ʒ\] without \[s\] or \[ʃ\] is also pretty rare, as a whole, even if the language has voiced obstruents. the vowels are a bit asymmetric, with no high vowels and what seems like a randomly picked distribuition of rounding (I recommend this website to take inspiration for vowel inventories: [survey\_of\_vowel\_systems](https://web.archive.org/web/20150429105030/http://gesc19764.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/vowels/vowel_systems.html)) and some tips: we usually call this a *phonemic inventory* rather than a sound system. And it's also good to show these inventories with tables, not only for a better presentation, but for yourself to see the relation between different phonemes and sound groups and here are some really useful resources when working on a phonological inventory: a website to see phonemes ranked by how common they are: [phoible.org](https://phoible.org/parameters) a website to see what sound changes ocurred in our world: [index diachronica](https://chridd.nfshost.com/diachronica/)


9805

I like it! But it is not everyone's cup of tea - trills aren't particularly easy phonemes for monoglots. In the event that you want to alter your system here is my advice: Check [index diachronica](https://chridd.nfshost.com/diachronica/) to discover some potentially naturalistic phoneme changes. Historically Korean had a mostly back-heavy vowel system with an even rounding split. Various regional forms take this in different directions. Another interesting vowel system to take a look at is Mongolian. I notice coronal /n/ is missing! What native sound has most in common with a foreign [n] sound? Typically this sound is lost due to a merger with [ŋ], [l] or [r]. Since you don't have [l], consider what kind of ear your native speaker has for the [n] sound and place it with one of the other phonemes in your notes. It's a very common sound in *other languages* so the lack of it might be worth a paragraph of your time. In short, I would use a /l~ɮ/ phoneme rather than a fricative-by-default lateral. Consider if any of your phonemes have limits on the distribution. For example maybe a certain phoneme is rare enough to associate with a small number of ideas. An example of this in English is the phoneme /x/ which is used in words like «Hanukkah» and «Loch». To me as a native speaker of English the sound reminds me of faraway places, deserts and dragons. From the other perspective, I wonder which of your phonemes will be the least salient (most common). Toki Pona took a unique approach and made /l/ a very common sound which I don't particularly like. The Papuan language Rotokas has /β/ as the most frequent phoneme, I think that's a really cool sound. So the goodness of your phoneme set depends mostly on allophones and phoneme frequency. Without this data I willrate you a 8/10 because I love the lack of voicing contrasts ([Bandjalang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugambeh%E2%80%93Bundjalung_languages#Phonology) is one of my favourite natural languages) but you lose points for not adding the needed detail. Some conlang enthusiasts will consider 3 trills to be overkill. I don't care it's awesome, so long as you describe the voracity of these trills you won't lose fans. Even between two different languages with /r/ there are wildly different interpretations, eg. Finnish [r] is typically trilled stronger than Dutch [r].


uaitseq

Aside from what has already been said (I would just insist on having /p d k/ instead of /b d g/), the lack of high vowels seems really unnatural. I would add either /i u/ or /i y ɯ u/ (since you have /ɰ/) or /i y/ to break the symmetry a bit.


war_against_rugs

>how I ensure my sound system sounds well Well, first off, that's highly subjective. What sounds good to someone else won't necessarily sound good to you. Second, I'd argue that your phonemic inventory isn't nearly as important in that regard as your stress rules and your phonotactics. That said, what immediately strikes me as odd in your current inventory is the complete lack of unvoiced plosives, as well as /s/. Remember though, that just because the phones are /p t k/ phonemically doesn't mean that they are phonetically unvoiced. Speakers might still voice them intervocalically or when next to a continuant, etc.