Teaching LH/CG Characters, OCs, and Others About Conlanging

Deciding the Phonological Features

Every language conveys meaning by recycling units. Spoken languages utilize consonant and vowel sounds for that purpose. This is something I (or one or more of my TTS cohorts either in place of or alongside me) would teach the course's students as part of introducing the phonology section, where we discuss phonemic inventories. Now, something exists that I/we/they would tell the students about, known as the International Phonetic Alphabet. It utilizes the methods a linguist needs to use to create sound inventories for languages so that people know how to pronounce the words in those languages properly. A language's sound list includes the sounds that are phonemic. Although, non-phonemic sounds like those of loanwords, as well as allophones of existing sounds are also included at times, though footnotes would be needed.

No natural language is expected to include every single phoneme in the IPA, so it's best to choose a handful for the phonology of the conlang being created.

Once the students have decided the goals for their conlang(s), they would need to figure out the consonants and vowels the conlang's inventory would comprise. They'd need to look through the IPA or the phonemic/phonetic of their native language inventories and the inventories for their heritage languages. IPA-based websites exist with audio files for pronouncing the vowels and consonants in the inventory and can help them out. I, my TTS cohort(s), or both/all *insert proper number here* of us would point out that DJP once clarified that romanization and orthography are not synonymous, especially regarding the letter "j" representing [j] in the IPA and the voiced postalveolar affricate in words like "jar".

As one would expect, there are sounds languages have that English doesn't, and vice versa, that is the case with the dental fricatives represented with "th" in English spelling. If any of the students plan to include more than one language for a fictional world, they should keep recurring overall sound frequencies in mind. Convention could be strayed from as long as they don't go overboard.

If they're struggling for sounds, perhaps one way would be to look for words from various languages, figure out the narrow phonetic transcription of those words for pronunciation, and make a chart with those sounds as a number of them are those the students might gain a liking to, and fill in missing gaps. The students should also keep sound symmetry in mind, which is when a sound of a certain place and/or manner of articulation is accompanied by a different one of that same place or manner. The places of articulation are the area of the mouth where the sound is being pronounced, while the manners are the ways of pronunciation.

Plosives, a.k.a. oral stops, obstruct airflow completely. Fricatives allow air to pass through akin to friction, hence the name. Affricates begin as plosives yet end as fricatives. Nasals let air flow through the nose. Trills involve the vibration of loose-enough parts of the mouth, albeit limited to the lips, tongue, or uvula. Taps and/or flaps are single-vibration versions of the trills. Approximants are about mouth shape and fully allow air to pass through. Laterals come out of the sides. Click consonants, a common feature of southern African and some native Australian languages, are pronounced by sucking in an air pocket and then releasing it. Implosives are pronounced by inhaling while pronouncing a normal plosive. Ejectives are voiceless consonants made by people when they're beatboxing.