Good morning, Interweb. Let's worldbuild.
In the last video, myself and Xidnaf decided upon my language's phonological inventory.
In this video, I'm going to lay out a plan for how those various sounds will interact
with one another. Basically, we're gonna talk phonotactics. From the Ancient Greek "phone"
meaning sound or voice and "taktikos" having to do with arranging, phonotactics sets restrictions
on the possible sound sequences and syllable structures in a language.
Hold on to your armchairs folks, we're 'bout to go down the rabbit hole!
Syllable structure
After much deliberation, I decided to make my language a (C)(C)V(C)(C) language.
What on Earth does than mean? I hear you cry.
To explain, words are made up of syllables. Syllables in turn are composed of three distinct
segments: the onset, nucleus and coda. For the most part consonants can only appear at
the onset and coda, and vowels only at the nucleus. In English, like in a lot of other
languages, the nucleus is obligatory while the onset and coda are optional.
Check it out: "I", "in", "mine", "a", "aft", "craft" ... "minecraft"!
Now, the Nucleus and Coda together form what's known as the Rime, 'cause like if we hold
the Rime steady and switch out the onsets we get, shock horror, something that rhymes.
At a maximum, English allows up three consonants to cluster at the onset and five to cluster
at the coda so it is therefore a (C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C)(C) language. Which is a lot, nothing like the
majestic Oowekyala (CCCCCCVCCCCC) mind, but certainly more than the minimalist inside
me was willing to deal with. On the other hand, sometime simple like (C)V seemed at
bit too restrictive, so I went with the moderately complex syllable structure of (C)(C)V(C)(C).
Phonotactical rule no.1 : (C)(C)V(C)(C)
Position:
In the onset, I decided to allow all single consonant sounds, including the very un-English
initial /ng/. I restricted all single consonants in the coda to everything except /h/, /j/,
/wº/, /B/ and /R/. Mainly 'cause I found it really hard to easily and consistently
pronounce words that finish with these sounds. So, words like /Ban/ and /hat/ would be totally
permitted in my language but /naB/ and /tah/ would not.
As for the nucleus, I decided to allow all vowels and all diphthongs and, just to take
a step away from English, I'm also going to allow /n/ as a syllabic consonant. Syllabic
consonants are consonants ( most often m, n, l, and r ) that perform the role a vowel
would in the syllable nucleus. Long story short a word like /pnt/ would be permitted
in my language.
Oh, and from the last video, I added in the requirement that the glottal stop must be
positioned between two vowels.
So....
Rule 2: Onset - everything Rule 3: Coda - no /h/, /j/, /wº/, /B/ and
/R/ Rule 4: Nucleus - all vowel + all diphthongs.
Also /n/ and
Rule 5: Only intervocalic glottal stops.
Clustering
Like I said, I want my language to be, at maximum, a (C)(C)V(C)(C) language so I needed
to address the issue of consonant clustering. Straight off the bat, I decided that the glottal
stop and /wº/ should not cluster.
Rule 6: /?/ and /wº/ never cluster.
Now, there's this thing called the sonority hierarchy. An ordered list of sounds based
on how loud they are....least sonorous to most sonorous. Syllables, for the most part,
tend to follow this kinda shape; the nucleus is the most sonorous part of the syllable
whilst the external segments taper off in volume. The English word "trust" is a good
example of sonority hierarchy in action.
I thought sticking to the sonority hierarchy would be a good idea, which meant that all
my onset consonant clusters needed to increase in volume and all my coda consonant clusters
had to decrease in volume.
I plotted these constraints in two separate spreadsheets - one for the onset and one for
the coda. And quickly realised that further constraints were needed lest my language suffer
death my clustering.
After another bout of deliberation, I came up with the idea of only allowing obstruents
to cluster with sonorants. That is to say, only plosives or fricatives can combine with
semi-vowels, liquids, trills and nasals. So, a word like /pra/ would be legal but /tpa/
wouldn't. Similarly, a word like /kla/ would be permitted but /kva/ would not.
The cool thing here is that this constraint brought my syllable structure closer to that
of many Southeast Asian languages where an optional semi-vowel or liquid, known as the
medial, is inserted between the initial consonant and the nucleus. Only my syllable structure
would look more like this perhaps: (C)(H)V(H)(C)
I really liked this mirroring effect so back to the spreadsheets I went, inputted the clusters
that met this constraint, and began systemically going through each and every sound - evaluating
each in terms of difficulty and interest. As always extreme cutting was inevitable given
my minimalist tendencies.
The onset clusters ended up looking like this and the coda ones like this.
Rule 7: Onset clusters = obstruent + sonorant Rule 8: Coda clusters = sonorant + obstruent
Mixing things up
I could have left things there, but, i dunno, it all felt a little too inorganic and formulaic.
I thought it prudent then to add in a handful of combinations that broke the sonority hierarchy
- if for no other reasons than to bamboozle future space linguists.
So, there's three main ways in which thought I could shake things up a little: plateaus,
reversals and just, like, random capricious insertions - which I'm not a fan of to be
honest.
Sonority plateaus occur when two sounds of similar sonority cluster, like a plosive and
another plosive for example. Think words like "fact" or "apt". Reversals, on the other hand,
turn the sonority hierarchy upside down, examples in English would be words like "spin", "sky",
"axe" and "hops" amongst others.
So, back to the spreadsheets I went, inputted all the possible plateaus for both the onset
and coda clusters. And again, systemically started evaluating and deleting sounds. At
this stage the onset clusters looked like this...I added in a couple of extra nasal
clusters just because I liked the sound of 'em. And the Coda clusters looked like this.
In terms of reversals...I didn't want to do too much with these so I just added in /sp/,
/st/ and /sk/ at the onset and left it at that.
And there you have it. One set of phonotactical constraints...done!