Finicky Phonetics Part 2: Vowels

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.

Image result for ipa vowel chart

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 monophthongs. You can even use vowels as part of diphthongs that aren’t in your language as monothongs! The English ‘O’ is actually a /oʊ/ dipthong and yet we don’t have a pure /o/ monophthong. Diphthongs can be rising (low vowel to high vowel), or falling (high to low). And in case you were wondering, yes, triphtongs also exist.
Some natlangs make matters more complicated by also having a tonal system, in which changing the pitch of you voice changes the meaning of the word. In Chinese, the most widely spoken tonal language, mā, mà, mă, má, and ma all mean different things! (the little symbol over the a represents if you need to raise or lower your voice as you pronounce the word.)

Want to distinguish by pitch without having a whole tonal system? Then pitch accent is for you! In languages like Japanese, Swedish, and even Ancient Greek, each word have a specific way the pitch of each word has to go. Instead of each syllable having a shape like a tonal system, each word has a shape.
There’s a lot I didn’t touch on, like nazalizatiation, creaky voice, and long and short vowels. There are many ways you can go about this, but I’m going to keep things simple. I’m not going to include a pitch system, but I may use it later to imply meaning like we do in English (eg. raising your voice at the end of a sentence to denote a question). Every natlang I have seen has at least one front vowel, one back vowel, and one unrounded vowel, and there seems to be a standard of /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/ monophthongs. This will be my starting point. Here are my vowels:

Monophthongs:
/a/ /e/ /i/ /o/ /u/
Diphthongs:
/ia/ /ie/ /io/ /iu/
/ua/ /ue/ ui/ /uo/
/ai/ /ei/ /oi/
/au/ /eu/ /ou/

Next time we will be looking at the way these sounds interact with each other: Phonotactics!

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