Pablang

Unlike consonants, all Vowels exist in a continuous space unsurprisingly called the ‘vowel space.’ Vowels are distinguished mainly by their height and backness, referring to the position your tongue is in when you pronounce them. This can be visualized on the chart below, where right to left on the chart correlates to their pronounciation from the back of the mouth to the front. Another common difference is rounded vs unrounded vowels. Rounded vowels are pronounced with pursed lips while unrounded vowels are pronounced while the lips are relaxed. Think about what your lips do when saying /u/ versus /a/. English along with many natlangs combines these vowels in different ways. For example, if you start by pronouncing /a/ but slide up to /i/ you get a new sound: /ai/. (When we say the letter ‘A’, we are really pronouncing it like /ai.) These diphthongs (coming from greek, di- meaning two and -phthong meaning sound) leads to a lot more variation than if you just had monophtho...

Phonetics is the study and classification of speech sounds. It’s also the first step in language creation! Which sounds does your language use and which are omitted vitally changes how your language sounds. Part 1 will cover consonants and Part 2 will be about vowels. Oh, and also, from now on  I will be using IPA formatting. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) created by The International Phonetic Association (also called the IPA) is an alphabet that has one symbol represent each sound across all languages. Anything inside slashes will be written phonetically in IPA. ipachart.com is a good interactive tool to see what sounds all the IPA letters represent and how to pronounce them. Many new conlangers make “kitchen sink” languages where they add too many sounds and it becomes a jumbled mess; by contrast, I will try to make my language on the minimalistic side while not being too simplistic. Here’s the number of unique consonants in some of the most common languages as a ...

Hi! I am Pablo, and this blog details my linguistic journey through making my own constructed language: Pablang! Why am I doing this? I think it was a family Bananagrams game, I’m not exactly sure. But for one reason or another, I was looking in the dictionary under “Sch” to see what other words besides school have that start. I found one that was short and sweet: Schwa: the mid-central, neutral vowel sound typically occurring in unstressed syllables in English represented by the symbol (ə) in the International Phonetic Alphabet. For example, in the word ‘America,’ you don’t pronounce either ‘a’ like an ‘a.’ Instead you make this neutral vowel sound and call it a day. I thought it was funny to have so many consonants leading up to just an 'a' sound. I looked deeper into the word that night (mostly because I felt bad winning with a word I didn't know) and fi ve hours later, I was down the rabbit hole comparing different Mongolian writing systems at 3:00 AM. That ...