Re: vowel scheme for new language

Joel Matthew Pearson wrote:

>For my conlang Tokana, I assuaged my guilt by adding a sixth, central
>vowel to the mix, giving:
>
>         i     u
>          E @ O
>            a
Hey, that's what I did for Tech!  (Old Tech really; the modern language has
bunch of extra vowels.)

>This system is much less common - although by no means unprecedented
>(Romanian has it).
It does, but with an additional high central unround vowel, Turkish dotless
I, Russian bI... (this is written as a^ or i^, where ^ is the circumflex;
the central schwa is a breve).

The six vowel system is supposed to be the vowel system of Nostratic, by the
way.  (According to Bomhard and Dolgopolsky's reconstructions;
Illych-Svitych has the eight short vowels of Finnish.)

>Another thing you could do is go the West African route, and have
>tense /e,o/ and lax /E,O/ be different phonemes, giving a seven
>vowel system:
>
>         i     u
>          e   o
>           E O
>            a
Italian does that too.  So does Scots Gaelic, but with an eighth and ninth
vowel: those two central vowels of Romanian incidentally.

>Or you could add front rounded vowels to the mix, giving a different
>seven vowel system:
>
>         i/y        u
>            e/oe  o
>                a
Add /&/ (/ae/ ligature), the low front unround, and you got that eight vowel
system of I-S I mentioned above.

>Or you could add a length distinction, or nasalisation...  Lots
>of ways to minimally modify the common five vowel system to get
>something a bit more 'exotic'...
Here are some ideas, though we're getting into some large (and exotic) vowel
inventories:

1) nasalization
2) aspiration ("breathy")
3) pharyngealization (Maltese has pharyngealized vowels; the Khoisan
language !Xu~ has nasal, pharyngeal, and nasal-pharyngeal vowels)
4) glottalization (Burmese has "creaky" vowels)
5) voiceless ("whispered", as in the Algonquian language Cheyenne)

... or something weird like ingressive vowels, glottalic vowels ("duck
talk"), even gastric egressive vowels (i.e. BELCHES!)

Okay I'll shut up now.

Danny


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