Yesterday, I submitted a post asking for your help in creating a global auxiliary conlang. With not much interest being shown in the first day of posting, I decided to go ahead and embark on this project alone.

Phonology & Orthography

My “north star” when designing the phonemic inventory for the language was striking a balance between usability and accessibility. In my humble opinion, minimalist languages such as Toki Pona excel in the latter but utterly fail in the former. More complicated languages such as Esperanto and Ido tend to do the opposite (they can be quite eurocentric). I believe I have found a happy medium between the two.

Consonants

The language’s consonants (and their graphs) are as follows:

  • Stops: /ph/ (p), /b/, /th/ (t), /d/, /kh/ (k), /g/
  • Fricatives: /f/, /s/, h /x~h/ (h)
  • Nasals: /m/, /n/
  • Approximants: /w/, /l/, /j/
  • Rhotic: /r~ʀ~ɾ~ɺ~ɹ~ɻ~ʁ~…/ (r)

I have chosen to aspirate the unvoiced stops to allow speakers from more languages to distinguish them. Those who’s native tongue distinguises stops on aspiration can use [ph] and [p] for /ph/ and /b/, respectively, and those who’s native tongue does so on voice can use [p] and [b].

Rhotics vary wildly cross-linguistically, making including one in a lingua franca very difficult. However, with how I plan to derive the language’s vocabulary, doing so seemed necessary. As such, I have coined the “whatever the heck rhotic.” So long as the sound produced is a rhotic, it is the “correct” phoneme for <r>. However, speakers who are able to produce multiple rhotics should use some discretion when deciding which one they use as some can be harder to distinguish than others.

My decision to include the remaining consonants simply came down to their presence cross-linguistically. I initially planned to create a heat map of the IPA with each phoneme’s “temperature” being a weighted sum of its occurrences in the languages on Ethnologue’s list of the most spoken languages, but the work required for that seemed to outweigh the benefit. As such, I did what every self-respecting linguist would do and eyeballed it!

Vowels

The language’s vowels are as follows:

  • High: /i/, /u/
  • Mid: /e/, /o/
  • Low: /a/

Ah, the ol’ five-vowel system, tried and true. I mean, there’s not much to say here. Moving on!

Phonotactics

The language’s phonotactic rules are largely inspired by those of Toki Pona. They are as follows:

  1. All syllables follow a (C)V(S) structure, where “S” denotes a sonorant that is not /w/ or /j/.
  2. Null onsets are word-initial only.
  3. No adjacent sonorants; codas always assimilate to following onsets.
  4. Words may be no longer than three syllables.
  5. To reduce sliding, /j/ is only permitted before /a, o, u/, and /w/ is only so before /a, e, i/.
  6. The penultimate vowel is always stressed.

Final Thoughts

This may not be much, but I am trying to refrain from hyperfixating and making everything too quickly as I want your thoughts on every step I take. What do you like so far? What could be improved?

Collaborators are always welcome!

Edit: Typos (of course)

  • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
    6·
    9 days ago

    I did something like this years ago. My phonology was surprisingly close to yours, as I used PHOIBLE’s list of the most common sound segments as a basis. Main difference was phonotactics, since I allowed more complex onsets.

    I’d suggest you to get rid of the rhotic, and instead allow /l/ to surface as [l ɾ r ɹ]. Three reasons:

    1. The main “role” of a rhotic consonant is to allow more complex syllables, something your language avoids.
    2. A lot of languages already do this sort of [l ɾ r] allophony; Japanese is an often mentioned example, but it pops up all across the globe.
    3. Guttural rhotics have a tendency to become dorsal fricatives, so depending on the speaker-hearer pair you might get that /r/ being understood as /x~h/. You can get rid of the problem by not having the phoneme.

    Loanwords will become rather opaque, and yet you’ll probably want a few of them for content words, as they’re often quick to identify even if you don’t speak the language. This can be alleviated if you have specific rules to adapt loanwords into your conlang - for example, where to insert epenthetic vowels, which vowel it should be (echo vowel? /e/? etc.).

    • sbf@feddit.orgOP
      5·
      9 days ago

      If you don’t mind, could you share your onset rules? I’d like to see if I can complicate mine a tiny bit more without sliding down a slippery slope.

      • Lvxferre [he/him]@mander.xyz
        4·
        9 days ago

        Sure! Basic syllable is (C)(r,u,i)V(r,u,i,n,f,s,h), with the following additional restrictions:

        • in Cr clusters C must be a stop; e.g. /pr/ is valid, *sr isn’t
        • /u i/ can only border a non-high vowel; e.g. /eu ou/ are valid, *iu *uu aren’t
        • /n/ cannot be followed by /m n/
        • if ambiguous, syllabification maximises onset; e.g. /VCV/ gets syllabified as /V.CV/

        For reference, here’s the full set of phonemes, with romanisation (the default was Cyrillic):

        Phonemes Cyr. Lat. notes
        /p t k b d g/ ⟨п т к б д г⟩ ⟨p t k b d g⟩ /p t k/ can be aspirated
        /ɸ s x/ ⟨ф с х ⟩ ⟨f s h⟩ /f/ = [ɸ~f], /s/ = [s~ʃ], /x/ = [x~h]
        /m n/ ⟨м н⟩ ⟨m n⟩ coda /n/ can be any nasal in coda, even [m]
        /ts r/ ⟨ц р⟩ ⟨z r⟩ /ts/ = [ts~tʃ], /r/ = [r ɾ l]
        /i u/ ⟨и/й у/ў⟩ ⟨i/j u/w⟩ the second spelling for each vowel is only when bordering another vowel
        /ä e o/ ⟨а е о⟩ ⟨a e o⟩ /e/ = [ɛ~e], /o/ = [ɔ~o], /ä/ = any low vowel
    • sbf@feddit.orgOP
      4·
      9 days ago

      Hm, that’s a good point. The whatever the fuck rhotic is gone 🫡