Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

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Isoraqathedh
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Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

Post by Isoraqathedh »

Are you a young language? Do you think that syllables are for squares? Do you want to try some other ways of joining up phonemes together? If so, then syllabic denial is right for you. In syllabic denial, the idea of a syllable is replaced by a concept called a phonorun, sometimes called a run for short. I'm writing this topic, which would eventually grow into a description of phonoruns written in a Q&A format completed in a standalone HTML document. But for now, I would like to field some extra questions from you guys too. For now, have the following:

Table of contents:
  1. Usage and prevalence
  2. Basic details (forthcoming)
  3. Describing phonoruns (writing)
  4. Phonoruns and the language (writing)
Appendix: An initial draft of the document, written in ordinary prose (but hopelessly broken format-wise)

Usage and prevalence

Come on. Syllables are universal right?
Yes. But that doesn't mean that you can make up something different yourself. It should be noted that even among Earthling languages, the idea of what makes a syllable and what doesn't remains contentious and doesn't stay constant cross-linguistically. The idea of phonoruns are just to pull it all apart and try moving in a different direction for a change.

How can you tell if a language uses phonoruns?
Generally you can tell by its prosody (forthcoming). However for a first glance, if the language seems to have a lot of convoluted consonant clusters and similar lengths of vowel clusters, you have good reason to believe that it is a language that uses phonoruns.

Do you have a language that can demonstrate phonoruns?
Yes. Throughout this document, I will refer to my conlang, Rattssaw (Rs), which explicitly uses phonoruns to cut up its words. Rattssaw calls itself #rattssá. All Rattssaw words will be written in italics.

What about a natural language?
Sorry, as far as I know this is a novel invention and isn't actually seen in a natlang.
Conlangs: EP (EV EB) Yk HI Ag Cd GE Rs, Ct, EQ, SX Sk Ya (OF), Ub, AKF MGY, (RDWA BCMS)
Natural languages: zh-hk, zh-cn, en
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Re: Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

Post by quixoticxenoglot »

Hey, you're on tumblr, right? Your stuff's fantastic.
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Re: Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

Post by Isoraqathedh »

Yes, I am.

Basic details

What is a phonorun?
A phonorun is simply a combination of phonemes that share some specific properties.

What's these properties then?
There are two types of properties: intrinsic and extrinsic.

Intrinsic properties are properties that the phoneme has by itself: voicing, place of articulation, manner of articulation, vowelness, consonantness etc.. On the other hand, extrinsic properties are assigned by the language itself and doesn't have to correspond to any particular quality of the consonant or vowel.

Rattssaw uses an extrinsic property to divide its phonemes into three different types.

Image

For now, using the orthography is sufficient in understanding how phonoruns work, so listing their IPA values is superfluous. Yes, even #, which unhelpfully has the IPA variable symbol /#/ for its value.

Can you have other types of division then?
Yes. Alternative methods of splitting up a phonemes of a language include:
  • Voiced and unvoiced phonemes. These languages often have unvoiced vowels (usually just one, notated /ə̊/).
  • Front, mid and back phonemes. For vowels these are obvious; for consonants front usually means dental/labial, middle usually means alveolar and back usually means anything further back than velar
  • High and low phonemes. Again for vowels this is easy; for consonants this usually concerns their manner of articulation.
  • Pulmonic and non-pulmonic phonemes. Rare because non-pulmonics are rare and hard to string together.
  • Random assignment. This is known in precisely one (as of yet undocumented) language, which has weird properties anyway.
Can I have multiple properties to divide upon?
Theoretically this is possible, but this multiplies the complexity and therefore it's much rarer.

What does "inheritable" mean?
It means that the letter changes category to conform to the previous letter. For example, in the word ael (eat), the l is open to conform to the open e, but in the word clt (modify, alter) The l is closed to conform to the closed c. The inheritable class is compatible with all methods of categorisation and indeed is fairly common cross-linguistically.
Conlangs: EP (EV EB) Yk HI Ag Cd GE Rs, Ct, EQ, SX Sk Ya (OF), Ub, AKF MGY, (RDWA BCMS)
Natural languages: zh-hk, zh-cn, en
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Re: Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

Post by shimobaatar »

Interesting concept so far, I look forward to hearing more about it.

My only specific question as of now is one of terminology:
Isoraqathedh wrote:vowelness, consonantness etc.
What do you mean by these words, exactly? I would have assumed you were referring to whether or not a particular sound could be considered syllabic/able to form the nucleus of a syllable, but given that you're outlining an alternative to syllables, I'm guessing my initial assumption is incorrect.
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Re: Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

Post by Isoraqathedh »

shimobaatar wrote:
Isoraqathedh wrote:vowelness, consonantness etc.
What do you mean by these words, exactly? I would have assumed you were referring to whether or not a particular sound could be considered syllabic/able to form the nucleus of a syllable, but given that you're outlining an alternative to syllables, I'm guessing my initial assumption is incorrect.
In this case, vowelness simply means that the airflow is not obstructed in any way by the tongue, and consonants otherwise. The exact interpretation would vary from language to language, so the most precise way of categorising phonemes would be to simply to list them out exhaustively, as I did with Rattssaw above.
Conlangs: EP (EV EB) Yk HI Ag Cd GE Rs, Ct, EQ, SX Sk Ya (OF), Ub, AKF MGY, (RDWA BCMS)
Natural languages: zh-hk, zh-cn, en
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Re: Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

Post by GrandPiano »

Isoraqathedh wrote:Come on. Syllables are universal right?
Yes. [...]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Coo ... #Syllables
Isoraqathedh wrote:
shimobaatar wrote:
Isoraqathedh wrote:vowelness, consonantness etc.
What do you mean by these words, exactly? I would have assumed you were referring to whether or not a particular sound could be considered syllabic/able to form the nucleus of a syllable, but given that you're outlining an alternative to syllables, I'm guessing my initial assumption is incorrect.
In this case, vowelness simply means that the airflow is not obstructed in any way by the tongue, and consonants otherwise. The exact interpretation would vary from language to language, so the most precise way of categorising phonemes would be to simply to list them out exhaustively, as I did with Rattssaw above.
So what about approximants, then? Are [j], [w], and [ɹ] equivalent to , , and [ɚ] in languages that use phonoruns? Is [l] a consonant or a vowel? And what about nasals like [m] and [n]? They don't really obstruct the airflow so much as redirect it.
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Re: Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

Post by Isoraqathedh »

GrandPiano wrote:
Isoraqathedh wrote:Come on. Syllables are universal right?
Yes. [...]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bella_Coo ... #Syllables
Isoraqathedh wrote:In this case, vowelness simply means that the airflow is not obstructed in any way by the tongue, and consonants otherwise. The exact interpretation would vary from language to language, so the most precise way of categorising phonemes would be to simply to list them out exhaustively, as I did with Rattssaw above.
So what about approximants, then? Are [j], [w], and [ɹ] equivalent to , , and [ɚ] in languages that use phonoruns? Is [l] a consonant or a vowel? And what about nasals like [m] and [n]? They don't really obstruct the airflow so much as redirect it.


Fair enough, syllables aren't universal. I'll edit that in. Still, it is pretty pervasive among the languages of Earth.

(It's actually those languages that inspired me to explicitly disavow syllables; I don't know why I forgot about them.)

As for approximants, liquids and friends, it's really up to the language to choose whether or not it wants to distinguish them or not, or say that it is a vowel or a consonant. As you can see above, «l» in Rattssaw (which has nominal value /l/) has an inherited value, which means that it assimilates to the previous phoneme when it comes to being open or closed. And later on, when I discuss edge effects and (maybe) sound changes, you'll know that /l/ can have both vowel and consonant allophones, in the sense that it has allophones, and those allophones, as a group, can span both the vowel and consonant charts.
Conlangs: EP (EV EB) Yk HI Ag Cd GE Rs, Ct, EQ, SX Sk Ya (OF), Ub, AKF MGY, (RDWA BCMS)
Natural languages: zh-hk, zh-cn, en
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Re: Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

Post by Isoraqathedh »

Terminology dump today, so we all know what we're talking about.

Describing phonoruns

What is the equivalent to syl-lab-i-fi-ca-tion?
That would be a word's signature. There are many different types of signature, but these two are the most common ones, operated on the word "#rattssá" , "#r-a-ttss-á".

The most common system comes from first writing out each run descriptively: Closed 2, Open 1, Closed 2, Open 1, and then condensing it down to C2O1C2O1C2O1. Taking advantage of the fact that any change in run also indicates a change from open to closed or vice-versa, we can then write C2121, which is the first form.

The second form instead focuses on the boundaries of each run, so we write 2, rise, 1, fall, 2, rise, 1. This can be intelligibly shortened to 2/1\2/1.

With other languages, which may have more categories, alternate systems can develop. However, Rattssaw has no need for these.

What do you call each of the bits of a phonorun, like how a syllable has onsets, rimes, etc.?
Phonoruns have no structure inside them, so a lot of the terminology that comes with them tend to revolve around how they interact with each other and with the word that they live in. Below are a sampling of terms.

Closed-start (gtt kksuər): A word that begins with a run of closed phonemes, as in the word csunə (the letter C), whose signature is C23.
Closed-end (gtt élwóuppś): A word that ends with a run of closed phonemes, as in the word islkk (the letter I), whose signature is O13.
Open-start (oiw kksuər), Open-end (oiw élwóuppś): Analogous to closed-start and closed-end but for runs of open phonemes.
Rising edge (ffrs lep): A change from closed to open, symbolised by / in the variant signature format.
Falling edge (áś lep): A change from open to closed, symbolised by \ in the variant signature format.
Edge or boundary (ayəron): Either a rising or a falling edge.
"Valley" (ssirhc or ssirc): A closed run that spans exactly one phoneme, as in owpiw (exit strategy, exit of a highway, active escape). owpiw has signatures O212 and 2\1/2. One can identify valleys by noticing a \1/ in the variant signature format.
"Mountain" (frwéils): A valley, but in reverse. Identified by noticing a /1\ in the variant signature format. It should be noted that the words frwéils and ssirc do not literally mean valleys and mountains as in the land features.
Undulations or pseudosyllables (alyèlrblucppi): A long chain of alternating open and closed phonemes, such as in the word pessitags (repeated opening and closing of an opening, vibration). This superficially resembles consonant-vowel pairs of languages that use syllables, hence the name "pseudosyllables", but keep in mind that the prosody is completely different. Pessitags has signature C1111112 and 1/1\1/1\1/1\2, showing that the way to detect undulations is to detect lots of consecutive 1s in the signature.
(Undulation) length (sfléió dfwor): How many 1s an undulation lasts. In the case of the word pessitags, the length is 6.
Jump-ramp, shore, diving-board, cliff-jump (boingə, bbstti, əttsk, ayəntt respectively): These correspond to the four different ways a run of 1 can start and terminate a word. They are written 1\, /1, 1/ and \1 in the alternate scheme respectively. The equivalent Rattssaw words are autological, that is, boingə has a jump-ramp, bbstti has a shore, and so on.
Conlangs: EP (EV EB) Yk HI Ag Cd GE Rs, Ct, EQ, SX Sk Ya (OF), Ub, AKF MGY, (RDWA BCMS)
Natural languages: zh-hk, zh-cn, en
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Re: Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

Post by Isoraqathedh »

I forgot about this, did I? Well, not really, just that it was stuck on the backburner. Here's the next section.

Phonoruns and words

Now that you have described phonoruns, what do you do with them?
You string one or more of them together to form words, as you will syllables. However, you might notice that some of the combinations that you might make are very hard to pronounce right, and you might be tempted to simplify the transitions between runs.

Wait, between runs? Wouldn't it be easier to simplify the monster clusters that happen with the language?
The general theme with run-based languages is that staying in a run is cheap (at first), while switching runs is expensive. This is why pseudosyllables get their own specific term, so as to mark really difficult tongue-twisters. As you can imagine, one requires a really different conception of what is easy and what is hard in order to fluently speak run-based languages.
Ah. So what about prosody details that span a whole word?

Such as?
Timing: Languages that use phonoruns generally have exactly one run per mora. In mora-timed phonorun languages, this is equivalent to saying that the language is phonorun-timed, but of course other modes of timing, such as stress-timed or intial-timed, can also apply to phonorun languages. Invariably though, stress applies only to open or voiced runs. Phonorun languages seemingly never seem to include phonemic stress in Pseudo.

The length of a particular run roughly follows a power law, viz:

T = constant × n54 + n48

As you can see, the power law isn't exact, but adding a small correction on the exponent helps greatly.

In practical terms, take the nonsense word cacicuceco. In an ordinary, syllabic language, that might take five beats, one for each ca-ci-cu-ce-co. But in a phonorun language, each letter gets its own "beat", like c-a-c-i-c-u-c-e-c-o, and the word would take 1 second to say completely. This is nearly twice as long as the syllabic version. Now consider the slightly different word cscscaiueo. This word is like the former, except the vowels and consonants are pushed to one side. Now this word would take a little longer to say in a syllabic language, as the giant consonant cluster slows down pronunciation, but in a run-based language, it is much faster, about 0.4 seconds or so. This is how you can distinguish a phonorun-based language from a syllable-based one. With another word, akcikcukcekco, this is even more obvious.


Stress: Stress in general always lies on open runs, as at these points it's easier to make emphasis. In this way there is a little bit of a bias towards certain types of run when creating stress.

In Rattssaw in particular, stress is found on the last open run of a "big word" (generally a noun or a verb) if it has one. Otherwise it never gains stress.

and so on: Other whole-syllable concepts, such as pitch information and accompanying hand gestures, can be transferred into phonoruns fairly painlessly, at least for those phonoruns that have vocalisation in them (it's hard to have tone on a thing that doens't involve your vocal cords.)

Planned for future posts: "Phonoruns and Writing Traditions" and "Phonoruns and Diachronics". That should be all for the concept.
Conlangs: EP (EV EB) Yk HI Ag Cd GE Rs, Ct, EQ, SX Sk Ya (OF), Ub, AKF MGY, (RDWA BCMS)
Natural languages: zh-hk, zh-cn, en
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Re: Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

So... What is the practical value of using this system over a syllabic one that, you know, every linguist the world over is familiar with.
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Re: Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

Post by qwed117 »

Thrice Xandvii wrote:So... What is the practical value of using this system over a syllabic one that, you know, every linguist the world over is familiar with.
TMK, it's the system used in his conlang.
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Re: Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

Post by Isoraqathedh »

qwed117 wrote:
Thrice Xandvii wrote:So... What is the practical value of using this system over a syllabic one that, you know, every linguist the world over is familiar with.
TMK, it's the system used in his conlang.
That, and I have been in a little bit of a contrarian streak lately, and there's nothing more appealing to a contrarian than a feature that all but about ten languages on Earth have.
Conlangs: EP (EV EB) Yk HI Ag Cd GE Rs, Ct, EQ, SX Sk Ya (OF), Ub, AKF MGY, (RDWA BCMS)
Natural languages: zh-hk, zh-cn, en
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Re: Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

Post by Znex »

How exactly do phonoruns manifest in speech? Can you provide an audio example of how it works?
:eng: : [tick] | :grc: : [:|] | :chn: :isr: :wls: : [:S] | :deu: :ell: :rus: : [:x]
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Re: Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

Isoraqathedh wrote:
qwed117 wrote:
Thrice Xandvii wrote:So... What is the practical value of using this system over a syllabic one that, you know, every linguist the world over is familiar with.
TMK, it's the system used in his conlang.
That, and I have been in a little bit of a contrarian streak lately, and there's nothing more appealing to a contrarian than a feature that all but about ten languages on Earth have.
So... You've made an entirely new system complete with a suite of brand new invented terminology just to be contrary to an accepted system.

Got it.

(Just to be clear, this isn't coming from any reliable source, you're just making it all up as you go along, correct?)
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Re: Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

Post by Isoraqathedh »

Thrice Xandvii wrote:So... You've made an entirely new system complete with a suite of brand new invented terminology just to be contrary to an accepted system.

Got it.

(Just to be clear, this isn't coming from any reliable source, you're just making it all up as you go along, correct?)
This is entirely correct. I have no intentions to apply run analysis to any existing language, and if one is uncharitable about what I am doing – I detect a minor amount of disgust of what I am doing here from you – one might refer to this as a "blind faith and a juggling of symbols". Symbols here being the (more or less atomic) letters of the IPA.

The actual origin of phonoruns as an idea came from reading about the non-obviousness of syllabification. Having also read about how Euclidean geometry can be "crippled" by removing some of its axioms, and how you can e.g. remove or add places of articulation at will, I try doing the same to another part of phonetics here, and literature elsewhere (with literature, the item removed from it is the concept of a character). This is done more out of curiosity rather than any claim of creating a "game changer" or a "paradigm shift", and removal and simplification of concepts is of course a whole lot easier than making a brand new one from scratch.

However, this is not to say that phonoruns are impossible objects, nor that they are indistinguishable in "practice" from syllables:
Znex wrote:How exactly do phonoruns manifest in speech? Can you provide an audio example of how it works?
The primary distinction of phonoruns to syllables is that of prosody, as I have mentioned above. However, it might pay to use some explicit sentences to illustrate the difference.

Take the sentence: psk ael bffs "I eat the newspaper". In IPA it would be /psk aɛl bp⁺s/ = [psk(..)aɛɫ(..)b͡β̆p͡f̆s] (the /l/ = [ɫ] is an edge effect, which is just phonotactics. More later). Each (..) represents a medium (word) gap. Furthermore, because each word has three phonemes, they take roughly the same amount of time.

Now, if we modify the sentence slightly such that we have psk stael bffs "I do not eat the newspaper", the IPA would become /psk staɛl bp͡f̆s/ = [psk(..)st(.)aɛɫ(..)b͡β̆p͡f̆s], with the (.) taking up a small but noticeable gap. This would be slightly different if you were to analyse it with syllables, which would make it /psk.staɛl.bp͡f̆s/ and therefore take less time than what phonoruns would predict, and because Rattssaw is defined to be run-based, then we can learn the difference between a hypothetical syllabic-Rattssaw and the ordinary one.

Or put simply, between each run there is a small gap that would not be present in a syllabic language. Usually that gap is glottalised, but this is not always the case.

As for an audio sample... I'm not sure if I can serve one up to you (needless to say, it's a lot easier to make a system than to actually use it!) but I hope the IPA symbols above can give you an idea of how it works.
Conlangs: EP (EV EB) Yk HI Ag Cd GE Rs, Ct, EQ, SX Sk Ya (OF), Ub, AKF MGY, (RDWA BCMS)
Natural languages: zh-hk, zh-cn, en
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Re: Phonoruns: an alternative to syllables

Post by Thrice Xandvii »

I think "disgust" is a strong word to describe my attitude in this context. While I think I did come off a bit abrasive, I guess I just got the impression that you were claiming a bit more authority on this concept than you actually are. I guess I just thought you were attempting to contradict things you weren't trying to. It seems you are merely positing a fictious alternate system.

To use one of your earlier examples... Do you think humans can readily say utterances like: /psk(..)aɛɫ(..)b͡β̆p͡f̆s/ without it merely becoming something like /psk|a.ɛɫ|b͡β̆.p͡f̆s/, or some likewise syllabification maybe with some schwas in there?
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