Vreleksá

Aert · Joined: 03 Jul 2008 Posts: 354

I was looking into phonology constriction in language, and thought "let's make one that has no voiceless consonants Very Happy

" (since m, d, b are all voiced and the first sounds babies make).

So here it is:

(IPA, then orthography)
consonants:
b b
d d
g g
h h
χ x (c?)
m m
n n
ŋ ń
ʒ (zz, ź)
(ʝ ɣ) ğ
ɹ r
(r ɾ) rr
v v
j y
z z
dʒ dź

vowels:
(a bit trickier - there's a system here:
basic sounds are /a e i o u/, and then one character for all of /ə ɜ ɐ ʌ/ (which is uncommon, I think).
unstressed (IPA is a breve) have a grave over the letter.
stressed (aspirated? geminated? other?) have a acute over the letter.
in dipthongs, one or both letters are accented (stressed dipthongs have both vowels accented, with the same accent on both letters [either grave or acute])

example I guess:
"Existence is existence as change, within a realm of possibility"
(Using Aert/Ylara vocab; this may turn into a descendant of these [dialects?]):
/vil gɛfliɪn diz anjerjɛnɪstʌ/ (original=Aert sounds)
Aert: Vhél geFléin, déz Anyáryenistų
Ylara: Vël Fàliÿn, cinà Anyáryens
new: Vil Vàlin, ginà Anyeryèns

I don't know what the language will eventually look like either... I'm not sure if I want to abandon either Aert or Ylara, but I don't have any specific new ideas for a grammar for this orthography, just the basic phonology.

So yeah, does anyone have an idea as to why a language would have no voiceless consonants? I'm not too worried about the vowel system, it's much simpler than most of my other ones, which are most similar to English (though not used the same).

Kiri · Joined: 13 Jun 2009 Posts: 471 Location: Latvia/Italy

Maybe the people are quite agressive and that shows in the language this way?

Aeetlrcreejl · Joined: 08 Jun 2007 Posts: 839 Location: Over yonder

Tolkien_Freak · Posted: Sun Sep 13, 2009 5:14 pm Post subject:

I don't know of any reason why a language would not have voiceless consonants. I can think of several why it wouldn't have voiced (an aspiration contrast instead of a voice one), but not unvoiced. If you had an aspiration contrast anyway, it seems like after a while one side or the other would become unvoiced.
At the least, without having a really odd and tiny phonology, you should probably stick some sort of consonant contrast in there (maybe an ejectives series or something). Even still you'll probably end up with a lot of speakers pronouncing unvoiced allophones in some places.

Aert · Joined: 03 Jul 2008 Posts: 354

Kiri · Joined: 13 Jun 2009 Posts: 471 Location: Latvia/Italy

Compare "tampaka" and "dambaga" Which one sounds softer? Which one sounds more agressive? See my drift?
Well, maybe it's just me Very Happy

Aert · Joined: 03 Jul 2008 Posts: 354

personally, I think 'tampaka' sounds more harsh/expressed than 'dambaga.'

I can't remember who did it, but a linguist asked people which shape 'looked' more like a certain sound, eg. roundish were more fricatives and nasals, plosives were jagged. Personally, I find the voiceless ones (t, k, p, etc) more jagged and less fluid.

That may be just preference though...

Tolkien_Freak · Posted: Sun Sep 13, 2009 11:35 pm Post subject:

Voiced sounds in general are less 'pleasant' to me (I like /t/ more than /d/), but only slightly. Overall for me place of articulation is more important (I hate /p/ and /b/ effectively equally).
I guess for me a good comparison would be /b/ < /p/ <big gap< /g/ < /k/.
(If you can tell, I really have a good idea of which sounds I like and which I don't. Maybe I'm weird, but individual phonemes to me give off different feelings (like /t/ feels somehow 'strong', and /l/ feels like sitting under a tree and looking at sunlight shining down through the leaves). The closer they are to the front of a word, the more they affect the overall feeling of the word, and sometimes their visual representation has an effect also.)

@Aert: I guess the main reason for not having voiced is maintaining a separate contrast system, like aspirated vs not or ejective vs. not. I guess it seems like 'unvoiced unaspirated un-anything else' is the base for any contrast system, with contrasts being more of the presence of a characteristic vs its absence. So it would be weird to not have an absence to contrast with the presence of voicing.
I know Chinese maintains only aspirate vs not, but AFAIK if a lang has contrasts other than voiced/unvoiced it's more likely to have them in addition to voiced/unvoiced rather than replacing it (Ancient Greek has unvoiced unaspirated vs voiced unaspirated vs unvoiced aspirated), and often adds a whole extra dimension (Sanskrit has all four combinations (/k g k_h g_h/), and some Mayan language (I think K'iche) has aspiration replaced by ejective-ness).

Kiri · Joined: 13 Jun 2009 Posts: 471 Location: Latvia/Italy

Baldash · Joined: 19 May 2009 Posts: 86 Location: Sweden

/h/ and /χ/ are voiceless.

If I were to create a naturalistic voiced-only phoneme inventory, then it would be something like:

/b d g m n l r j w/
/a u i e\ o\/

Voiced only fricatives isn't very realistic.

and let's incoporate /ŋ ɹ/ since you like them (I guess).

/b d g m n ŋ l r ɹ j w/

Then, I would have the syllable structure (C)V(N), where N is any consonant except /b d g/. A more complex syllable structure would probably have voiceless allophones of at least /d g/.

Of course, if you don't care about naturalism, then you could do whatever you like, except that you need to remove /h/ and /χ/ to get a completely voiced inventory.

I agree that aspiration is a bad idea. You generally has aspiration on unvoiced plosives, and when the consonant is voiced it isn't strictly aspiration. My own conlang contrasts /p_h b t_h d k_h g/, the aspiration and the voicelessness is basically two sides of the same thing.