Here is the IPA stuff for my language:
Vowels
[Vowel Grid]
Front: [i, æ]
Central: [ə]
Back: [u, o, ɑ].
Look at the italics for the equivalent way to say each sound.
[i] = beat or each.
[æ] = fat, pat.
[ə] = blood, about.
[u] = boot, gooey.
[o] = Go, Ohio.
[ɑ] = hot, spa.
Consonants
[Consonant Grid]
Plosives/Stops: [p, t, k]
Nasals: [m, n, ŋ]
Trills: [ʙ, r]
Fricatives: [f, s]
Approximant: [j]
Lateral Approximant: [ʎ]
Most of those are just like the equivalent letters in English, so I'm not going to give examples of them all... but not all are so straight forward.
[ŋ] = The "ng" sound in sing.
[ʙ] = No English equivalency. The closest is the "brrr" sound. Think of this as a trilled "r" and a "b" at the same time.
[r] = Trilled r. I can't think of a good example for this.
[j] = The "y" sound in you or yesterday.
[ʎ] = The "lli" sound in million.
For real fun, you may want to compare this to the original phonology I came up with. Also, these are still set to change- especially because I haven't really made many words in my language yet. This phonology may prove to be not very usable for whatever reason- and I might be forced to add or delete sounds until I can get something that works. Basically, as the language develops, so will the phonology. As I was telling my linguistics professor today, it's a start for the language. A fairly "simple" phonology- 6 vowels and 12 consonants (compared to the 15+ vowels in English and... uhh.. probably more than 15 consonants, as well).
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aberwak- Scott, aka Frodo, aka Scooby, aka Ketchup
- StrangeGravity
Comments
so, in a description of a phonology, one should also describe how the sounds actually occur. you can go to various levels of detail (are the [t]-like sounds laminal dentals, apical alveolars, apical post-alveolars, or what?) but that's probably not necessary here.
prosody is things relating to stress, pitch and tone. the language might not use any of these extensively, but it'll always have them to some degree; see turkish for an example of a language with almost no stress, and mandarin for a language with extensive use of contour tone.
phonotactics describe what syllables are allowable in the language. languages differ extensively on this. english syllables can be of the form:more or less. japanese syllables, on the other hand, can only bemore or less. phonotactics are generally harder to describe than as a simple regular expression, as i've tried to frame them above, but can be generalized that way.
one important thing to remember is that syllables almost always form around a sonority peak; if you don't know what sonority is, please look it up. it's basically how "vowel-like" a given segment is. syllables tend to go from low-sonority to a high-point at the vowel, then down again, until you get to the next syllable.