(Conlangs) Q&A Thread - Quick questions go here [2010-2020]

[J Reggie]

Has anyone created an alien language with sounds that humans can't produce? How would you go about notating these sounds? I had an idea for a language spoken by creatures with rattles on their faces among other things. Any ideas?

[Lambuzhao]

rattles on faces

Interesting! I think Kiwikami did something of this sort with one of her langs.
You might ask her.

Failing attempts with IPA (basically created for human air passage/sound production), or Visible Speech By Alexander Melville Bell (which may get you closer, since some atypical vocal sounds may be represented with VS), what is left is the imagination.

I happened to google musical notation for a rattle, and got a Maracas Rhythm Library on Scribid. So, based on its contents, you may need special symbols for:
Basic Sounds:
- Shuffle
- Ball~Toss troke
- Single~shot

Advanced Sounds:
- Flam troke
- Four Stroke Ruff
- D Swirl
- Wrist roll
- Circular Roll

[Pabappa]

Has anyone created an alien language with sounds that humans can't produce? How would you go about notating these sounds? I had an idea for a language spoken by creatures with rattles on their faces among other things. Any ideas?

i like the music idea.

closest Ive come is some of my early work, where i said that language had arisen before the human species had, and therefore the various apelike creatures had languages of their own with slightly different mouth anatomy. this was all pen & paper, so i just made up symbols for the various not-quite-human sounds and wrote everything in capitals. Unicode might have all the symbols you need, especially if you dont need to raise and lower symbols to indicate pitch ... though the writing is bound to look odd, no matter what you use.

÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷

Im interested in your idea too .... do humans live side by side with these creatures? can they communicate verbally with each other or do they just use written words and sign language? if so, how does each species handle the impossible sounds of the other? (I never quite answered this question myself, other than to say that they would use written words and hand signs.)

[yangfiretiger121]

As of now, my conlang lenites [ b] → [v] before near-back vowels (cf. <ba> [vɑ̟]) and Romanizes its moraic (lateral) fricative ([ɮ]) as <v>. Is that enough distinction for mismatching <v> and [v]? The language's syllable structure is CV(m), where (m) is moraic <m>, <n>, <nk>, <ng>, or <v>. The clusters <nk> and <ng> merge into [ŋ].

[Creyeditor]

Looks okay, I would say

[LinguoFranco]

Can someone explain to me the different voices? I am familiar with creaky voice and probably breathy voice, but what do slack voice and stiff voice sound like?

[zyma]

Can someone explain to me the different voices? I am familiar with creaky voice and probably breathy voice, but what do slack voice and stiff voice sound like?

For clarity’s sake, I’d probably say “phonation types” or something like that. “Voices” made me think you were asking about active, passive, etc. until I saw the mention of creaky and breathy voice.

Nit-picking aside, I assume you’ve already looked on Wikipedia?

[Creyeditor]

Can someone explain to me the different voices? I am familiar with creaky voice and probably breathy voice, but what do slack voice and stiff voice sound like?

Okay, I can roughly sketch the explanation I got, when I asked a professor, but I cannot pretend to undertsand every detail of it. Disclaimer: I am talking about the phonation types of vowels, so I won't go into detail on Voicing Onset Time of stops etc. Maybe someone else can do this. Also keep in mind that many voicing distinction on stops are actually audible on the surrounding vowels.

So, the basic idea is that there are one parameters in what you can do with your vocal folds: aperture, i.e. how much you open them. This is not independent of stiffness though. If you open them all the way, a lot of air can escape, this is what yields a voiceless phonation. If you close them, no air can escape and you produce a glottal stop. In between, there is a so called 'sweet spot', the point of aperture where your vocal folds produce maximal vibration with minimal effort. This is what yields (modally) voiced sounds. Now in between the sweet spot and fully open vocal folds languages can have breathy voiced vowels, which are closer to voiceless vowels, but still show some vibration of the vocal folds or slack voice, which is closer to modal voice. Here the stiffness of the vocal folds becomes important. In slack voice the vocal folds are slightly less stiff (or more relaxed) than they should be for maximal vibration and thus we get a different phonation. Similarly, between the glottal stop and modal voice, there are two categories, creaky voice, with the vocal folds just opened a tiny bit and stiff voice, which is - again - closer to modal voice. In creaky voice, the vocal folds vibrate, but the aperture is very small and not a lot of air can escape. These sounds require more effort. Stiff voice requires the vocal folds to be more open. The vocal folds here are stiffer, than optimal for the sweet spot and thus there is not as much vibration as in the modal voice sounds.

So, to answer your question. Slack voice sounds like a mix between breathy and modal voice, whereas stiff voice sounds like a mix between creaky voice and modal voice. I once heard an audio file of supposedly slack and stiif voice sounds in Javanese and both sounded just voiced to me. Go figure

[yangfiretiger121]

I'd like to do something null-onset or hiatus, similar to Chinese's use of [ʔ] and [ɣ] for null-onset, in my conlang. If I do something, I'm favoring pharyngealization because it's already used for allophonic emphasis for minimal pairs (cf. ujav [ʊˈʝɑ̟ɮ] (meaning unknown; historically, ujag) and ujav species ([ʊˈʝɑ̟ɮˁ]; historically, ujagh)). It will begin as hiatus-only, if I do it. Would that set up be stable or, eventually, include word-initial vowels as well by analogy?

[this_is_an_account]

I've got this consonant inventory I've come up with that I'm having a bit of trouble with.

/m n ŋ/
/p t k q ʔ/
/pʰ tʰ kʰ qʰ/
/s ɬ χ ħ h/
/z~ɹ ɮ~l ʁ~ʁ̞ ʕ~ʕ̞/
/j w/

I want to have either voiced fricatives with approximant allophones, or approximants with fricative allophones. Which of these would be more naturalist?
Also, which environments would trigger these allophones?

[Leo]

Implosives being complex articulation, do they generally mutate, or mutate neighbors, in a consonant cluster? For instance, is amɓa stable enough to persist? How about abɓa?

[Creyeditor]

So the answer is more complex than the question I guess. Implosives are really happy about prevoicing, just like prenasalized sounds, so /amɓa/ is okay I guess. For /abɓa/ it's a bit more complicated. If the first stop is released, then the articulation is rather complicated, since you have to change the voicing mechanism. If the stop is not released, it might actually sound a bit like [aɓːa].

[Leo]

Thank you for the quick response, Creyeditor. This is for an old language of mine which I am revisiting, with frequent onset implosives, but as I am trying more morphological composition I find myself subjected to glottis pain :D aɓːa sounds good, this is what I was tending to produce spontaneously. And I am discovering that geminate implosives are something special, not quite sure why yet.

[Frislander]

I've got this consonant inventory I've come up with that I'm having a bit of trouble with.

/m n ŋ/
/p t k q ʔ/
/pʰ tʰ kʰ qʰ/
/s ɬ χ ħ h/
/z~ɹ ɮ~l ʁ~ʁ̞ ʕ~ʕ̞/
/j w/

I want to have either voiced fricatives with approximant allophones, or approximants with fricative allophones. Which of these would be more naturalist?
Also, which environments would trigger these allophones?

Either: it just depends on how many environments the different realisations appear in. So if you only find the approximants in intervocalic position but the fricatives elsewhere, then the fricatives would be the underlying sound, or if you only found the fricatives word-initially it'd be the approximants you'd say as being underlying.

(personally tbh I think the whole idea of "allophones" is complete shit, but that's by the by).

[zyma]

(personally tbh I think the whole idea of "allophones" is complete shit, but that's by the by).

Just out of curiosity, might I ask why?

[Frislander]

(personally tbh I think the whole idea of "allophones" is complete shit, but that's by the by).

Just out of curiosity, might I ask why?

Because I'm an exemplar theory man, who believes "phonology" is merely an emergent property of a multitude of remembered phonetic word tokens, so while ideas like "phonemes", "allophones", "features" and so forth may be useful in describing patterns in languages, they do not necessarily reflect an actual underlying mental representation.

[Creyeditor]

We will talk about exemplar based approaches to phonology in a seminar this semester. I'm really looking forward to it. Exemplar-based conlanging might be interesting, too.

[Omzinesý]

(personally tbh I think the whole idea of "allophones" is complete shit, but that's by the by).

Just out of curiosity, might I ask why?

Because I'm an exemplar theory man, who believes "phonology" is merely an emergent property of a multitude of remembered phonetic word tokens, so while ideas like "phonemes", "allophones", "features" and so forth may be useful in describing patterns in languages, they do not necessarily reflect an actual underlying mental representation.

Concept of "allophone" combines two different things.
1) Every time I or somebody else says "car" we pronounce a bit different token of phoneme /k/. All of them are called allophones of /k/.
2) /k/ is pronounced systematically differently in different phonemic environments, say /k/ is aspirated in "car" but not aspirated in "skip".
So there are the tokens and the systematic allophones. Therefore I find that concept somewhat problematic. Usually it's though only used in sense 2).

I think that describing mental representations - whatever they are - is much better done in cognitive science than in linguistics. Linguistics, like all non-natural sciences, is just about making a thing understandable for people, describing. And there can be many descriptions of the same phenomenon that all give a relevant piece of knowledge.
The concept of "phoneme" with different "allophones" is especially handy when a morpheme is combined with another morpheme and the phoneme gets in contact with a different phonetic environment. Because the morpheme, however, is the same, the phoneme also has to be the same. I have sometimes played with the idea that a language lacking morphology also lacks phonology, because phonemes can never be proved the same.

[zyma]

(personally tbh I think the whole idea of "allophones" is complete shit, but that's by the by).

Just out of curiosity, might I ask why?

Because I'm an exemplar theory man, who believes "phonology" is merely an emergent property of a multitude of remembered phonetic word tokens, so while ideas like "phonemes", "allophones", "features" and so forth may be useful in describing patterns in languages, they do not necessarily reflect an actual underlying mental representation.

Hmm, interesting. Thanks for explaining your position.

[zyma]

I think that describing mental representations - whatever they are - is much better done in cognitive science than in linguistics. Linguistics, like all non-natural sciences, is just about making a thing understandable for people, describing. And there can be many descriptions of the same phenomenon that all give a relevant piece of knowledge.

Well, cognitive linguistics exists. And even if you're not explicitly a cognitive linguist, language as a phenomenon is so intrinsically tied to human beings, and therefore their brains, that I don't think it should be considered strange for at least some linguists to consider things like underlying mental representations. Because of the nature of language, linguistics can cover a broad range of topics, some of which intersect with cognitive science, biology, etc.

I, personally, happen to not be very interested in cognitive matters, preferring instead to study and describe surface-level language, so to speak. That's the kind of linguist I'm studying to become. I like concepts like "allophones" because of how useful they can be in describing language as we can observe it on more of a surface level. The same goes for a number of other people. However, that doesn't mean that questions related to the "deeper", cognitive aspects of language are any less relevant to the study of language, linguistics, as a whole.

Long story short, I think it's limiting to draw sharp distinctions between scientific disciplines. Just because, for instance, not all linguists are concerned with cognitive science, that doesn't mean that there's no overlap at all between linguistics and cognitive science.

Reading back over this, I realize it might come off as defensive or upset, but that was not my intention at all. This is just something I've been thinking about lately.