How to Make a Language - Part 2: Phonology
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- čas přidán 23. 09. 2018
- In this episode, we take a look at the basics of constructing a sound system, including phonetic inventory and phonotactics.
If you're looking to learn more about phonology and sound systems, I strongly recommend Artifexian's IPA series, which examines the nuances of the IPA in much greater detail than this video: • IPA Basics : Place of ...
Music by Fearofdark: fearofdark.bandcamp.com/album...
What i learned from this video:
1: languages are freaking complicated
2: people who invent languages are insane
..ly talented and got way too much time on their hands.
No, making a language isn't that hard, nor time consuming. Making a good one on the other hand...
That depends what your using the language for. some people create the language simply because they can. I'm creating a language to put it as a part of a game, where players can unlock aspects of the game through understanding the language.
Tłoôki øø'øpó si'lla ľa 'oñña siñģo'
It's not actually that hard. It seems insane at first, but once you actually start doing it it's extremely easy. See, you don't actually have to be fluent in your conlang. All you have to do is make the language, and reference the grammar and dictionary when you need to translate something. The only real difficult thing is when you start getting exceptions, but even then it's not so hard.
Thanks baby
We have "rah rah" and "ah ah ah" let's throw in "roh mah" and "roh mah mah" aswell as "ga ga" and let's not forget "oh lah lah" WATCH OUT BAD ROMANCE
Lol it got me
"Languages most often contain five vowels"
* laughs in danish *
Rødgrød med fløde ...
*laughs in swedish*
in german
* laughs in English *
laughs in !Xóõ
There may be an /i:/ in team, but there's no /m/ in Mohawk
Nor a /m/ in Makah, a language completely missing nasals all together.
@@tophu7903 wait idk if this is a dumb question but then how did it come to be written with an m?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makah_language
They call their language qʷi·qʷi·diččaq. Makah is probably an exonym.
Biverix 🕐🕐♥️🃏🃏🔕🇲🇷🇲🇷🇲🇻🇲🇻🇲🇻🇲🇿🇫🇲🇫🇲🇳🇿
Pixie Panda Plush those superscript are a convention of IPA transcription of its pronunciation, the romanization (if there is one) should be different.
we have rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, rah, and Rasptuin, lover of the Russian Queen.
But we know that he had a cat, but it was really gone
And we have rah, rah, roh, mah, mah
@@justaregulartoaster and ga, ga u la la
**Takes a shot everytime they said a word**
rah rah, rah rah Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen, rah rah rah rah Rasputin, lover of the Russian Queen.
take a shot every time he says 'but English speakers...'
@@scriba5777 Still laughing!
Dead by the end of the night
E Valenic I'm saying this from beyond the grave, I died of alcohol poisoning, boo.
H snrid CBS I svndyfruxn
I wonder what language this video was written in
It amazes me that humans are able to make so many different sounds, and add meanings to them. This concept is truly extraordinary.
Agreed
wish your mom could understand them. she can't even understand a basic "wanna f" and just slaps me! that's insane!
@@janJosu wow we laughed a lot when we saw this comment
@@janJosu omg so funny king 👑🥰
it's not that crazy. there's probably animals who have done the exact same thing, just we don't hear a language, we just hear animal sounds.
Wow. As an aspiring ConLanger, this is by far the most useful beginner’s guide I’ve found! Thank you for making this
B I G G I E C H E E S E
B I G G I E C H E E S E
Good luck
Istg, I just started and picking the right sounds took like an hour.. the vowels were easy enough, took like 5 minutes. But choosing easy to pronounce and symmetrical sounds was...
@@ethanbeharry9478 How did you do it? I've been struggling with this for hours. I don't understand how any of this works at all and I've looked at tons of different things. Everything I find uses super technical language which I don't understand and overall it's just not been a good time.
Biblaridion: Im going to add these sounds, since they are very common.
Me: *Looks at a mix of extreme rare sounds I put together to create an excuse of a language.*
Hello, epiglottal plosive, whatcha doing down there? Come to play with the velar affricate, lateral velar fricative, voiceless uvular implosive and the BilaBial trill!
ʡ͡ʢ ʘ t͡ʙ̥ ɳ̊
@@Diego_2-22 what the fuck is that /j
@@eyemoisturizer Rare phonemes
@@Diego_2-22 The second one is a click sound, isn't it? I've been making random clicks to myself just to get a sense of sound.
The comments: Making corrections, understanding what's going on, just generally comprehending all of this to some degree
Me: Has no idea what's going on despite having my hand held the entire time
Same. Lmao.
same here. i feel incredibly stupid.
I'm praying that I have the basic idea on what to do and am taking notes for later
same
same, still having trouble understanding the consonants and vowels table thing
"too many sounds is bad"
laughs in alien language spoken by creatures that can't produce nasal glottal, labial, and dental sounds but can otherwise make human sounds
Exactly
laughs in ubykh
That’ll be one harsh sounding language
Is that a real language?
Komaru Naegi you cant just say that it’s real without linking it or at least dropping the name, we wanna hear it
Super minor detail, but in the "moderately complex syllable structure" slide, you wrote "two bears" in Mandarin as "èr tóu xióng", or "二头熊", when it should be "liǎng zhī xióng", “两只熊”. "Èr" is replaced by "liǎng" when counting things, and the measure word for bears should be "zhī", which is the standard measure word for animals, while "tóu" is only used for livestock.
Ah, I see. I never knew what the rule was for using 二 vs. 两, I generally only use 二, and I thought 只 was only the classifier for small animals.
@@Biblaridion Yeah, the difference between 二 and 两 is pretty blurred, but the general rule is to use 两 before a measure word. There are some exceptions though, like when saying "the second" something. You would use 二, like "第二个..."
Huh, I guess I won’t be learning Mandarin any time soon.
I'm native Mandarin speaker and this is the first time I'm informed "tóu" is only used for livestock. It's common to use "tóu" to count large animals like elephant, bear, etc.
Also, er is represented the retroflex vowel ɤ˞, not e with coda r
**Uses welsh ll sound**
English speakers: "You what?"
Me, a welsh speaker: "Hehehe llanfairpwllgwyngyllchwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch"
@a normal person It's a town over in Wales. Suprisingly, i can say it quite well, maybe to do with my love of lateral fricatives (I ❤ fricatives), but my god is it a beast to spell.
Is the llll an elongated consonant
I don't speak Welsh (at least, not much...I know a couple historical names from a picture book I read as a kid called The Mightiest Heart, and I know some place names and numbers, but I do speak Yurok, and it's really fun to watch people who aren't familiar with it wrap their heads around that sound (in Yurok it's written as HL instead of LL). I usually like to say "Hlke'-mohl-kes, hlkwer-terkws" ("Shut up, tree frog") instead of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllchwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch. I also know a fun little Yurok tongue twister, if you're interested: "Nerhk-ser-'er'y chery-ker-'ery ler-'er-gery chyer-'er'y," which means "Three small black-coloured black bears."
@@t33nspirit3d nope, it's just 2 ll put together. The entire name is just a massive description with no spaces.
My teacher last year was Welsh she tried to teach us how to say this
Are you fluent in a language you have made? and have you shown/taught it to somebody else and spoken it?
This please!!
Rule Britannia almost no conlang creators are . just because you make a word does not mean u remember it especially less common words
The simplified version, but im still trying to be fluent in the more complicated and deep meanings of the language.
I'm hoping I'll be conversationally fluent in mine and teach it to a friend of mine
Man, I WISH. I could say anything out loud and nobody you care
As an estonian, learning the differences between short, long and overlong vowels as a child was damn hard. Our language is way too complicated.
*laughs in Czech* try learning the "vyjmenovaná slova (chosen words)" and also "pády (falls)". Let me tell you more about pády. Soo, I don't know how to properly say this, just... Just try to understand, ok? So, in english, you just say mom in all instances, like *to mom, with mom* and so on. But in Czech you say the word máma (mom) different in all of the different sentences 😵 ok lemme show you all of the "falls" of the word máma (mom):
1. máma
2. mámy
3. mámě
4. mámu
5. mámo
6. mámě (yes, again)
7. mámou
And you do this with almost 👏 every 👏 single 👏 word 👏 in 👏 every 👏 single 👏 sentence 👏
Ohh and there are also *vzory* 😵
*Rody* 😵
*Vyjmenovaná slova* 😵
*Bě, pě, vě* 😵
Like ig estonian *IS* pretty hard, but not as much as Czech.
@@ninjaDuhac I hope you know, that Estonian also has cases, but 14, when Czech just 7.. you knew it before typing this, right? right?....
btw I know Slavic languages (Polish, Belarusian and Russian). Sso yeah, Slavic languages are complicate as hell, but Uralic languages aren't easier at all
@ninjaDuhac Try learning Mandarin Chinese, it's REALLY hard. More harder than Czech.
Well, my humanoid species lack noses, so no nasals in mine.
@@sephikong8323 laugh in Harry Potter
i mean, great job taking all factors into consideration!
How do they smell?
Terrible!
@@rosiefay7283 Lucky they can't smell it then.
so no
no nasals*
About the quote "there's no sound the human vocal tract can produce consistently that isn't featured somewhere on this chart", regarding IPA:
There are some problems with this claim. It is true that all sounds from any natural language ever categorized are approximated by something on this chart reasonably well. However, there are sounds that could potentially be featured in a natural language, but for some reason are not used by any such language as a phoneme. Hence, those sounds do not have a symbol in the IPA (they are not needed). Of course, the slot for those sounds exist, and they can be described within the IPA; there's just no symbol. Example: A "voiceless nasal-ingressive velar trill" (basically, snoring) can be produced consistently, and could easily serve as a phoneme, but no natural language uses it.
On the other hand, just because a sound appears possible from looking at the IPA does not mean humans can actually produce it. There's a linguistics joke: A "voiced nasal-ingressive velar trill" could be fatal; and if you wonder why that is, you are strongly advised not to try.
TL;DR: If you create a conlang, the symbols in the IPA are *not* an exhaustive list of the phonemes you can have, and still create a language that could be spoken by humans. There are free "slots" in the IPA that you can explore. On the other hands, some free slots are better left unexplored for health reasons.
The IPA is evolving. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labiodental_flap for an example of a symbol added recently (2005).
"...voiced nasal-ingressive velar trill" I tried it. I didn't die. In fact, it's quite a cool sound.
Or else I'm just not doing it right, because I frankly do not get the joke...
Dude you have WAY too much time on your hands
Ingressive consonants aren't convinient, they create an enbalance in breathing because during speech you always have to switch quickly between exhaled and inhaled consonants, your breathing and heartbeat get faster and that leads to tiring speech which means less communication: the opposite of what langusge was made for. That's why you don't find them in human languages nor in conlangs.
Could anyone describe what "voiced nasal ingressive-velar trill" means?
I'm gonna try to make a viable language based on minecraft villagers. The main challenge, i think, will be a very small set of sounds.
Hurr, mhhh. Ehq mehh.
@@Flavio06626WOAH THAT IS EXTREMELY ANTI SEMITIC
@@decorativewingdings how?
@@decorativewingdings It's the internet, man. PEople will say ANYTHING behind a screen. Tsk, tsk.
That's why I like french : we don't care about stress !
The rest is usually pure nightmare though
kokoado At least it doesn't have the clusterfuck that is old french noun declanstions
@@the_biblioklept2533 thats an interesting take i wonder if nativlang ever put it in his french bread bakery dough video if hes into meme as a inbetweener of his main vids
@@the_biblioklept2533excuse me
A language without /n/? Look at Iau, which has one of the smallest consonant inventories in the world.
And Central Rotokas, which has a similarly small consonant inventory (/p t k b d g/ and that's it), but then head over to Puget Sound in the US state of Washington for Quileute, which has over 30 consonants, none of which are phonemically or allophonically nasal.
Marc Telfer
I live in Washington, the native languages here are insane phonetically. There are just so many sounds- mostly ones I could never hope to pronounce. Nuxalk, which was shown at 12:20, is another Coast Salish language spoken in British Columbia. They’re like that.
I speak French, and french has suprisingly subtle changes in vowels, but that most non-speakers don't necessarely hear. However, in more informal talk, those subtle differences tend to disappear. I also speak russian, and we have a soft-sign that indicates when we should "soften" a sound.
ayy russian english french squad
I have determined that I am physically incapable of pronouncing palatalized consonants in coda position (at least, not without an epenthetic schwa). No problem at the beginning or middle of words.
12:40
Huh... I am a native German speaker, but I have never heard of the term "Afterwissenschaft".
Is this supposed to be anal science?
I mean... Yeah, that is pretty much the exact translation. :D
I've been wondering about that, too
same
Same.
"Well, this sounds fun"
-goes on wikipedia-
non-sibilant fricative, tap/flap, bilabial, tenuis, implosive I AM ABOUT TO IMPLODE LOL
I know. I was like What the fuck?
It's actually easy if you learn it
I was just out there clickin all the audio options til i found ones that work-
0:40 this chart of our german sounds is partly incorrect! First correction: I don't know any time we use θ or ð in our own words (no modern loan words). The correct Vowels are: ɪ,iː ʏ,yː ʊ,uː ɛ,eː œ,øː ə ɔ,oː ɑ,ɑː.
Yeah its generally weird. Having dental fricatives, voiced postalveolar fricatives and the glottal stop as phonemes is a choice, but you can make an argument for it. But dental n? Velar affricates? Seperately listing velar and uvular fricatives and fricative and trilled uvular r? What?
Yes, it throws in there loan words and a lot of local dialects
@@gb-jl9yq And no palatal fricative. I get that [ç] and [x~χ] are just allophones and don't need to necessarily be listed separately, but if both x and χ are already listed…
There’s a phonological feature that Finnish has which is “Vowel harmony” that I absolutely love, that even the proto version of my conlang has it
I love that!!!
im a huge fan of vowel harmony, i think finnish sounds sick. do you know other languages featuring it?
You and the other billion people that used Finnish as a base. Overrated and overused tbh.
Hmm...I feel a language spoken without opening the mouth is very odd and inefficient...but would be interesting..
Like... sign language?
@@michaelkern8022, no not at all. The language is still "spoken", just without opening the mouth. Think of humming.
@@liarliarplantsforhire2581 It's just a bunch of different types of M's strung together.
The British English exist
International Sign Language maybe?
out of any conlanger on youtube, your video's are helping me the most. thank you!
You have to keep your species' sound-making methods in mind as well. For example, those with no lips, stiff lips, or strepsirrhine characteristics (e.g, split lips) will tend to stay away from bilabial consonants and instead use labiodental consonants, while those with no nasal passage equivalent will completely omit nasal-based consonants.
I did this for my feline inspired language. No bilabials OR dentals (because sharp teeth go ouch). But it had palatals, uvulars, pharyngeals, and about 25 vowels with no limit on vowel hiatus. And just for fun, it was highly agglutinative. For example, "tree" was nio'oe'iaxhhao'agya, or "it fun and talls for climb but scary down."
I've been conlanging as a hobby for a few years, and I need to say that yours is the best for introducing newbies to the hobby. Hell, as I watch, I might pick up on something even I didn't know. This series deserves much more attention than it gets.
“I’ve yet to *see* a language without an “ah” sound”
ASL: Am I a joke to you?
LOL
That just doesn't have any sounds
@@ZombossLordOfDoomthat's the joke 😐
I like how you are making a language without knowing proper grammar for English.
Use ' when a quote is inside a quote.
@@Unide.ntified I hope you feel like you made a wholesome contribution to this discussion. In all actuality, I was not making a language at the time I wrote that comment. Rather, I was doing research on linguistics and phonology. Interestingly, I wrote this comment while I was a seventh grader. You have corrected the grammar of a middle schooler. I hope you feel satisfied in yourself and your actions. Perhaps you will go on in life to be nicer to people on the internet!
Additionally, I would like to note how anglo-centric it is of you to think that English is (or, I suppose, was) my first language, or that I must fully understand English to make a language. In reality, language is an art of the people; it is shaped by both the literate and illiterate. To assume a perfect knowledge of the English language is foolish. Humans everywhere throughout spacetime have needed and created ways to communicate with one another, despite their lack of comprehension.
I urge you to go forth and to be a nag no more. Have a great day!
(I quickly typed this reply on my phone, so I apologize for any errors within my reply. However, I believe that an intellectual like you should be able to read past my errors and understand what I meant to say. If not, then I suppose the loss is yours!)
Every single time I am a bit stuck with my conlang, I return to this series. It’s such a good guide, I religiously follow every single bit of it.
Xilzhei xilzhoä, Biblaridion. Kolsegranovo duna.
wow thanks for making me hate the word "strengths". but, y'know, thanks for also adding conlang creation to my list of strengths.
Dang it, this is too hard for me. I was so exited to make a language
Nah, you can do it! I thought I couldn’t, but now I’m working on one!
Past me was a fool, making languages is fun
@@sharksuperiority9736 Now this is character development!
@@Debre. Hell yeah!
I am still struggling, like I have no tools
7:41 I can't believe you missed a perfect opportunity to say "we'll add /w/, /l/ and /j/, and voila"
I don't get it...
Feel free to r/wooosh me.
glottal lateral affricate i would but i don’t get it either lmao
@@mambooooooo917 "wa la"
@@mambooooooo917 Pronouncing your name almost made me throw up blood lol.
To make creating larger amounts of languages, I chose to make a soundbook, basically an Excel spreadsheet that had each sound I could make all graphed out, to pick through, rather than have to pick through the IPA charts each time i tried to make a language. It was also all written in a way that my English speaking mind could understand, rather than having to find the sound in IPA to find it's pronunciation.
Sounds fascinating! I would love to see a picture! Great idea.
12:17 My brother passed by while I was trying to pronounce the second one.
Hm?
I may be blind but I’m not seeing any vowels there
Well, IPA cannot notate every sound. For example, Korean "plain" consonants are often notated as tenuis consonants, but they're not. they're still aspirated, but the air pressure is weaker than "aspirated" consonants.
(edit: im referring to narrow square bracket thing)
The really confusing thing is that Korean has a third series. I tend to think of them as voiced, tenuis, and aspirated but that's not quite right.
@@unfetteredparacosmian yep. Korean doesn't have voiced unvoiced distinction. Well, instead we use what I call "strength" distinction. Unvoiced sounds are usually really soft and weak so people usually put more air pressure to it. Put your hand in front of your mouth and say "sss" and "zzz". You'll see that when you say sss you actually feel more pressure. Korean "plain" sounds are technically aspirated but with the weaker aspiration.
Well, this explains why I had to turn the vocal duolingo test questions off. I'm sure a Korean speaker would laugh at my terrible accent.
But imagine how many short words you could make using 55 consonants!
this is just base-120 all over again
imagine how many you can make with the entire ipa!
_laughs in Circassian_
dies of laughter in Chechen
9:18 Why follow English conventions? I think it would be a good idea to mention that, with romanizations for one's conlang, it is more of a stylistic choice. Besides, using English as a basis for romanization isn't the best idea lol (ex. , , and ).
Depends on what you want from your romanization. Usually the point of it is to make it easier to read, and if most of the readers are native English speakers, then it makes sense to make it English-y.
@@thesuomi8550 - Very difficult to make because English pronunciation and writing are all but related to each other: it's almost like writing in one language and speaking in another, you get used to that of course, but it's very weird. Also your fantasy conlang would probably have its own script, so you're using Latin alphabet (approx.) as "simplified IPA". Say you want to have one (or several) of the weird English vowels, for example the sound of "u" in "cut" (different from "u" = /u/ in "put"), a good choice would be to use some variant of "a" (closest 5-vowel system sound arguably) such as "ä" or "â".
Remember: Latin was a 5-vowel language, if you use Latin script to approximate some other language and you do have a choice (what doesn't happen with English for example, because of history, tradition, rules...), you should start from that Latin phonemic scheme, as many languages through the World have done with reasonable success.
@@LuisAldamiz but why should you have a simplified version of ipa? You can always just write it in ipa if you need to
@@thesuomi8550 - It's not convenient for reading, or even for writing (you won't have many of those characters in your keyboard). Real languages with phonemic scripts do that: take Latin script (most often) and modify it only mildly, mostly with digraphs and marks on top of letters (there are some exceptions like the Polish ł or the Turkish ı or the somewhat common ç, but the general rule is use Latin letters to mean approx. Latin sounds and variants with markers like dieresis or with digraphs, to indicate other sounds, such as ü, ö, ts, ch, etc.) I think Finnish also does that, so you shouldn't be surprised.
Also IPA conventions are sometimes "against common sense", for example "x" is used to mean a sound like Spanish "j" or German "ch", often approximated as "kh" in English (this is because of the original Greek pronunciation and also archaic such pronunciation in Old Spanish, retained in words like México, Oaxaca, etc.) In most languages however "x" is /ks/ and AFAIK that's how is most commonly written in Finnish (i.e. "taksi"). So if you write something like "axe" in IPA people would tend to pronounce it close to English "axe" and not as intended, i.e. "akheh". That was also illustrated in the video with the switch from IPA's "j" to more conventional "y".
@@LuisAldamiz isn't changing j to y a bit of an English concention as well? And you can make your own keyboard where you have all tge necessary ipa characters for your language, so that's not a huge problem. Also, what you just described is exactly why you could just go with an English-y romanization, right?
7:55 jan Misali intensifies
vore
gore
@@patersmurfus3965 r/whooooooosh
*S I L E N C E R E D D I T O R*
@@australianman1897 names in toki pona have their first letter capitalised
I'm afraid the IPA table for French is wrong. Some phonemes are missing, such as the nasal vowels, but I guess that's because you simplified the table. On the other hand, French doesn't contrast /æ/, /a/ and /ɑ/: most speakers only have /a/, some still contrast /a/ and /ɑ/, but this is becoming rarer due to sound change. /æ/ isn't a phoneme in French.
Damn, you're right. No idea why I didn't include the nasal vowels. I can't remember where I copied the vowel chart from, but yeah, some of those aren't right. Thanks for letting me know.
Also, romanizations are enclosed in angle brackets or chevrons, not slashes. Slashes are for phonemic transcriptions and brackets for phonetic transcriptions, thus we have /pɪn/ [pʰɪn].
æ is phoneme as far as I know, but it must have merged with another sound.
@@mrpellagra2730 /æ/ has never been a phoneme of French. It might be an allophone of /a/ for some speakers, but never a phoneme.
@@Biblaridion Also in the table of English vowels I saw that you put a previous, closed and not rounded vowel / ɯ /, which surprised me because although I am not a native speaker I have seen in a thousand and one English channels that use the IPA and in none This phoneme appears and the truth is, I don't know any word that has this phoneme in English, maybe some allophone but I don't know.
2:02
When Hogwarts borders Middle Earth.
This is probably the best and most detailed conlang video I have seen. It has inspired me to create my one language, utoshteol. Keep the work up!
The conlang I'm creating is called Dayashni, and three of the sounds I've incorporated so far are "shya," "shña," and "thya."
How is you language going?
@@charlesroyal5125 Slowly
I was just paying attention to the conlang until I saw that the music was from fearofdark. That guy is amazing!
This is the list of consonants for my conlang p, t, k, m, n, ŋ, f, s, x, l
My list is a little longer!
B,d,f,g,g,j,k,l,m,n,p,r,s,t,v,x,y,z!
Yuck!
2:01 i love this picture, I know it's not canon or anything, but it makes me feel like I don't need the franchises to compete because they were made for eachother.
Thanks so much for this, this series is why I started conlanging. Keep up the good work :)
I've never thought of using hl for ɬ, Good idea. Would you say it's more likely for a coda to grow or simplify over time
When we get to Part six, we'll discuss some of the sound changes that can increase or decrease syllable complexity. Which one occurs is more or less arbitrary; there's plenty of cases of languages that underwent a reduction in syllable complexity (e.g. Old Chinese to Mandarin), as well as those that underwent an increase (Latin to French).
Xhosa does it, like in Nelson Mandela's native name, Rolihlahla.
@@Biblaridion Shouldnt the HL sound like the welsh LL? Someting like ŠL ( SHL)?
@@arandomlanguagenerd1869 It should. However, Welsh LL /ɬ/ -- basically, a devoiced /l/ -- doesn't really sound all that much like ŠL /ʃl/ (at least, not to a Welsh-speaker)!
@@Ynysmydwr yeah, it sounds like [S] to an untrained ear because it's almost sibilant but not as sibilant as [s]
You're using // incorrectly. Slashes are for phonemic transcription (or broad transcription as it's called). You need angle brackets for graphemes. Also, calling /j/ post-alveolar even though it's the only consonant in that column seems, weird.
In case you want to know at all, the question mark in the glottal stop box at 4:19 is an okina. Which is represented by a `(which looks like a backward apostrophe) and is considered an actual letter in the Hawaiian alphabet.
Edit: After actually studying phonetics more, I realized that the symbol was actually the symbol used for the glottal stop in the phonetic chart and wasn't a question mark. However, everything I said about the okina was still correct, and I just got confused since the symbol for this in Hawaiian is like I said ( ` ).
Bro the way you said /ts/ at 6:46 is somehow incredibly cool for ways I cannot describe because I'm probably just mad. But I swear you said a single sound in the coolest way possible.
Him: You don't have to have any previous knowledge
Me, having no previous knowledge: WHAT?! How?! What is this chart? where are the letters from the Wikipedia page? Why are those Latin characters?
You don't have to know the entire chart. For starters,you can just use sounds that are familiar to you and don't need to learn to mess up your mouth to produce. Just search up ‘International Phonetic Alphabet’. When you see the chart just click on sounds with characters that seem familiar and take a look at their sound,then choose. You don't need to know the entirety of it.
If not,search ‘Artifexian IPA’ on CZcams.
I've only just started watching this series, and I'm already inspired to try my hand at conlanging. This should be fun. Or drive me insane. We will have to see with time.
Emo Pony fato in my Language means I eat a lot.
How did it go?
On the note of languages without nasals, you mentioned Rotokas. The phoneme inventory you presented is for the Aita dialect, though, while the Central dialect (or Rotokas Proper) does lack phonemically distinct nasals. They do appear as allophones of the voiced stops (which also appear as voiced fricatives in certain environments), but apparently their nasal realisations only occur in speech which attempts to mimic non-Rotokas speakers trying to speak Rotokas (so I guess sort of an out-group marker in narrative speech. Something similar happens in some Native North American languages where one phoneme is switched out for some other sound to mark out a specific speaker within the narrative, although it's mostly mythological characters).
Languages that lack nasals, do exist, though, they're just notably rare. The general trend seems to be that in languages that do lack nasals, it's because the nasals shifted to their respective voiced plosives without any leftover nasalisation, for example, on surrounding vowels.
Always love the CC on these
"There is no sound that humans can produce that isnt on this chart"
Beatboxers: *Hold my liproll*
What about ejectives
That would be the bilabial trill, yes?
I am wondering if you have any suggestions for how to set up the chart? What program might you use to make your chart?
You can also pause a little to put emphasis on your next consonant, like in Italian, or do soft consonants, like in Russian.
So, I've been kind of learning Conglanging by doing for the last few years, and I find this video really interesting. I got lucky, and organized the language in a way where I kind of did this without realizing it? The language is very reverent of ten specific words, and only contains sounds present in those ten specific words. I just had to make those up and I was golden for this part from then on.
Im just excited to be the only person in the WORLD who speaks my language.
12:10 here you must have used Doric Greek, but wrote Ancient Greek in general. In Attic, the dialect of Athens, there were letters and sounds for kh(Χ), ph(Φ) and th(Θ) thought these letters and sounds did not appear in some of the Doric dialects of Greek, such as Spartan, Corinthian, Epirot and Macedonian. That's why you found this word to be ptongos, while in Attic it is phthongos (φθόνγος) which later, in modern Greek became φθόγγος (phthoggos).
This helped so much! Amazing how many things I didn't know about this process!
Wow this is such a great video for an introduction to this
I’m making my first conking right now, and this is going to be incredibly helpful.
My conlang is for a mostly mechanized species who have trouble pronouncing letters like H and S. S is an incredibly common letter in the parent language they developed from, so it has mostly been replaced with Z and the Ple”ss”ure noise which I will use (zh) to show. Alongside that 14 other consonants and 7 vowels are present each with their own rules about placements in words, every syllable has the CVC structure, unless starting or ending a word. J (y), L, and W cannot be but at the end of a syllable due to pronunciation problems with many following letters. J also can not lead into a vowel that sounds a bit like “ya” or “ia” which is represented by a symbol similar to Y. Other than that it’s pretty simple having B, D, K, M, N, P, R, T, V, as well as “eth” an old English letter, and a “Ch” sound. The normal 5 vowels, as well as a new A so that way I can have the A as it sound in both the word “apple” and “ate.”
(8:50) ŋ is at least available on a few QWERTY layouts.
But if you're going based on the US English keyboard, then you are very limited.
13:00 The audio track misreads the two English words, switching them (or at least that's the order). Transcribed phonetics is right though.
I actually did choose my sounds I want but I am still watching to give this man some watch time
I just had to go and pause at 2:02 to look at that map. I absolutely can't get over Mordor being just north of Moomin Valley.
4:43 there is a dialect of a language spoken in southern california without any nasals
HOW THE FUCK DO THEY SAY NO OR MOM, OR ANY OTHER WORD WITH NASALS?
@@edgardox.feliciano3127 Lmao magic
@@edgardox.feliciano3127ki, sal
Idk just random words i thought of
Avīeš. Eideha ynykka ilhniyya Alex!
This is my own language, Ulfian, and this is the Ulfian sentence in English.
Hi. My name is Alex!
What does each word mean?
Venje, l'vejaro, tredze trı ______
Thats "Hello, my name is _____" in my language, Veqona.
Ereyikem! Mehi'unde isi Mikayil!
Hello! My name is Michael!
@Tanjiro Kamado Is this right phonetic (IPA) transcription?
[a.ˈviː.eʃ | ˈɛɪ̯.de.ˌha y.ˈnyk.ˌka il.n̥i.ˈyː.a ˈa.leks]
Thyir isha na haetharya kontent 👍... Idiranash ir na khara shathrim hashtirathrir "languages", ir iminashthrir thyiran videos 🙏🙏🙏 😘
Великолепный курс, спасибо!
I just noticed that the vowel chart for French has several phonemes missing: ɛ, œ, ɔ and nasal ɛ̃, ɔ̃, ɑ̃
Howdy! Do you by any chance have a template for the IPA charts you were customizing?
Thanks for making this series, it's so awesome and helpful!
I was thinking the same!
I was thinking of making a silk road routes ancient proto language. Totally fictional but plausible for my village Rag Doll characters as the town later became en route for travelling traders/merchants which helped spread the language which then evolved in other locations. I'm trying to look at the wikipedia ipa and compare common sounds across some ancient languages to include in my chart
Really great guide. I'm a grammar pro, but know I have also a very good understanding of phonology, even though I am not an English native speaker (so probably in this comment you will find the German punctuation), thank you.
Biblaridion: carefully chooses common sounds and includes liquids
Me: no liquids, 8 vowels, and a ton of non-common sounds must be ez
ONe thing to add is stress timed languages have a larger vowel inventory. Example english as almost a 1:1 vowel consonant ratio, and Portuguese is also stressed times and it has a lot more vowels then spanish.
Very interesting. I hadn't come across that observation before.
hey, i got a question, so there are a millon sounds categories on wikipedia, but on the ipa chart there is way fewer so i don;t know where to put alot of the sounds
I’m actually making a conlang that’s meant to be a mashup of Arabic and Chinese so this is extremely helpful
8:20 - Rather "fit" vs "feet", this /i/ vs /i:/ is the most common English short vs long vowel contrast, also appearing in a common L2 embarrassing error: "shit" vs "sheet".
Nope. The vowel in "fit" is not only shorter, but also more open than the vowel in "feet". So they are not the same vowel. The IPA transcriptions would be [fɪt] vs. [fi:t]. German (my native language) does the same thing, where long vowels get more tensed (closed/ high) than short vowels. It is sometimes quite hard for native speakers of such languages to lengthen vowels without also tensing them, since it is an integral part of the phonology of their native language (I still have to concentrate to do it right).
The example he chose was a good example, since it is one of the few in the English language where the vowel quality doesn't change, only the length does.
@@gavinoaw Considering that most languages that are called to have "vowel length" have slight difference in quality, are you implying that "true" phonemic vowel length almost don't exist?
If it's another language, why does it matter if the letters are easy to understand in English?
How would i go about implementing voiced consonants? would i add it here in the proto-language or when it evolves to the modern form
What charts are you using? The IPA chart on Wiki (and around the web) is very different from the one shown here
Man, I love this video, but one minor question from almost two year later. Is there any way we could get pre-filled or editable copies of your simplified charts? The actual IPA charts are kind of a mess, at least in my opinion.
help can I have both closed and open syllables in my language
@@sweetpie1373 I'm not entirely sure myself, because I am by no means a professional linguist... but I do have a kind of solution that may help. While I'm not personally familiar with any language with both open and closed syllables, it seems entirely doable if you are only looking for it to *sound* closed.
In Japanese, most characters either represent a vowel (such as あ; a) or a consonant followed by a vowel (か; ka). Japanese has a really odd character that represents just the consonant sound of N (ん; ŋ or N in IPA) that is still technically open, but which sounds like a closed syllable when spoken. That is because their mora treats that singular sound as its own syllable. So in words like にほん (nihon), the mora would be ni.ho.n. The n is still an open syllable, but when spoken it sounds more like ni.hon, giving the illusion of a closed syllable. It also has a strange case with character combinations like っきょ (kkyō; this is literally one open syllable, but looks really strange in words like けっきょく (kekkyo ku; something to the effect of "after all" or "finally") where the mora is something like ke.kkyo.ku.
This is actually the approach I am taking with my own conlang, where n and r are allowed to come after a vowel, but they cannot be codas if used this way. Thus, a word like cancer would be ca.n.ce.r, not can.cer. Finally, hy can be used between a consonant and a vowel to specify that the consonant gets additional stress in words like Khyu` (phonetically this is pronounced kʲɯ:, with the h denoting that the vowel is pronounced during the release of breath caused by the consonant being held).
Hope that helps a little bit. :D
At 12:40, you translated pseudoscience as "Afterwissenschaft", which doesn't make much sense to me (well, maybe, if you consider it so full of BS that you'll call it literally "anus science" ^_^ ), as it's called "Pseudowissenschaft" [ˈpsɔɪ̯doˌvɪsn̩ʃaft].
Also, regarding the stressed syllables in German, there are at least three types: Stressed prefixes (auf-, an-, aus-, bei-, mit-, ...), unstressed prefixes (be-, ent-, zer-, ...), and prefixes with changeable stress (unter-, über-, um-, ...) like in "UNterstellen" and "unterSTELLen". Words of foreign origin are often stressed differently as well.
Names can also get weird sometimes, especially foreign names. As an irritating example: in the German dub of Naruto, they completely ignored the original japanese pronunciation and intonation, used German rules on the romanization of the names, stressed and voiced unstressed and voiceless syllables, etc., resulting in names like ['ɯ.tɕi.ha 'sa.sů.ke] becoming [za:'zu:kə u.'ʃi:ha], or ['a.ki.mi.tɕi 'tɕo.dʑi] becoming ['ʃoj a.ki.'mɪ.çi].
I guess, as long as there is no official or ingrained rule dictating the pronunciation of foreign words and names, defaulting to your own phonology is the norm. And fixed pronunciation rules should only count for non-foreign words, with a rare exception here and there. Depending on the number of neighboring countries, the different intonations should be increasingly irregular. Germany has nine, therefore we simply have to memorize the intonation of many former loanwords.
Interesting. If I recall correctly, I got "Afterwissenschaft" from a German dictionary. I guess it wasn't a particularly reliable one? German has been on the list for a while, but embarrassingly, I've never actually got around to having a proper look at it...
Yeah, repair strategies can be weird and unpredictable sometimes. I always have trouble with that when I bring loanwords into a conlang.
@@Biblaridion Huh, apparently Afterwissenschaft really exists, but Pseudowissenschaft, Scheinwissenschaft and Pseudolehre are much more common. I've never heard of Afterwissenschaft in my life (29 years old). Researching its etymology revealed the prefix "after-" to be obsolete as well. So maybe your dictionary isn't particularly unreliable, but a bit outdated^^
And yeah, the rule of thumb is, that people are lazy most of the time. So either pronounce it like it's written or write it like it's pronounced, or one after the other.
Like the French "sauce" [sos] becoming Sauce [ˈzoːsə], which in turn became Soße, to reflect its German pronunciation.
There are aesthetic exceptions as well. For example, すし (romanized as sushi) becoming Sushi, with Suschi being extremely rare, despite more often than not being pronounced [ˈzuːʃi] instead of [ˈsuːʃi].
Or multiple words deriving from the same root, but with slightly different meanings, such as Caesar becoming Cäsar [ˈt͡sɛːzaʁ] (Julius Caesar) and Kaiser [ˈkaɪ̯zɐ] (emperor, imperator), due to C being ambiguous in its pronunciation.
Just do what "feels right"^^
From now on I will call pseudoscience "anus science" lol
So I’m making my own language as of now and already have a good start I have taken out all “sh” and “ch” and love the way it sounds like this sentence says “yes, I am Aidan from Missouri, who are you?” “Ai Lakoy Adon kom lomasku, ze Neto yow?”
Would it be overly complex/unrealistic is my language had a five vowel system with the back vowels exhibiting both umlaut and nasal forms (truly 11 vowels)? I also may have added way too much grammatical complexity with 9 cases and verbs that conjugate by all persons and 5 tenses. On top of that, my conlang uses ablaut to indicate tense, but only if the stress falls on a back vowel. Should I scale back?
I'd create a conlang just for the sake of making it different than all existing conlangs: most of them have a CV structure - mine would be CCCCVCCCC and have distinctive consonant length, just like my own nativ language.
The majority don't have a CV structure. I might have slightly overdone it in mine tho with things like "stqmvclgchpnzt" being root words lol
Majestas Alt And does this root word have any specific pronunciation? It is nice when a conlang creator is able to pronunce his inventions or at least make sure they are possible to produce by a human.
It is pronounceable for me. I'm on mobile tho so can't IPA
@@unfetteredparacosmian sounds like you just have no idea how the IPA works, unless you have been on mobile for the past 3 days
@@whatno5090 I have been on mobile. I don't usually use CZcams on computer
My language is going to have 8 vowels: a, e, i, u, y, o, ø and ə.
Edit: I gave up on my first conlang. My second one has 12 vowels
How do you type those last to symbols?
@@levvi917 I just copied them and then pasted them. But I will have to search easier symbols for my language:
(The IPA is on the right)
a = a
a: = aa
e = e
e: = ee
i = i
i: = ii
u = ou
y = u
y: = uu
o = o
o: = oo
ø = eu
ə = y
My own language has 14 vowels: a, å, ä, e, ë, ē, o, ö, ø, ō, u, ū, ß, û
Mine has 15
mine has 7
How can I know which sounds can be putted together in my language chart?? Coz I've heard before that for example if I add a "V" I'll have to add a "Z" too... I need help about those linguistics things
I'm working on my second conlang now. I made one before, using this series as a guideline. I'm coming back to refresh my memory and I thought for fun I'd drop the phonology here. Consonants: m, n, p, b, t, d, k, g, ʔ, s, z, sh, zh, f, v, x, ɣ, h, l, ɾ, r, j, ʟ
Vowels: a, e, i, o, u, ə
The vowels can all be short and long except ə.
Hearing this makes me think I missed a few steps making my language. I have sounds like DZJ, DZW, DZV, represented by an separate alphabet which I added later to my normal alphabet both irl and headcanon.
Use ipa, how am I supposed to know what "DZJ", "DZW" and "DZV" are supposed to be?
@@thesuomi8550 My whole comment was about I had yet to configure my language with a set tone on paper lol a quick search d͡z[ʝ] for DZJ. DZW= d͡z[ʋ] and DJV=d͡z[V] my A's are ⟨a⟩ like in Dutch and Japanese.
Nice!
Very useful video. In a Phonology course at my PhD programme, I was assigned the task of creating a language, particularly its phonology, and I must respect the patterns/standard/universals.
By the way, you said at 4:42 that you're yet to see a language that doesn't have a [n]. Tucano, an Brazilian indigenous language, has no nasal at all.
linguistics.berkeley.edu/~saphon/en/inv/Tucano.html
I have a question about 13:40 of the example. What’s meant by Maximum Syllable, is it the total number of Codas per word or something else.
So when creating the sound chart, are there sound restrictions we should follow? i.e. categorical restrictions?
Also, I just wanna note, English is a weird language, even for somebody born in the USA, for example with long vowels you could say "Can I have some coke?" If you were to cut the long vowel you would get.. "Can I have some 🐔?"
Weeell...
Where do i get this chart ? 06:16
I think he uses a program like Excel or something but I am not sure
after all the time I spend as a conlanger, still this is the best source I use for learning.
I can get my head around the different consonants but choosing what vowels to use feels difficult and I can't quite get match the letters to the sounds they represent. Does anyone know of a useful chart for this kind of thing? Especially as the IPA chart looks quite different to the samples given here in its layout and such.