My goal with creating the phonology for my language was to keep it fairly simple while leaving room for a variety of sounds. Most of the phonemes are inspired by Japanese as well as the phonotactics and grammar. One of the key features by design is that voice is not phonemic, so it can be understood equally well while whispering.

Writing and Phonology

The writing system is IPA with some exceptions.

Stops: ʔ, k, c, t, p

Liquids: ɣ /ʟ/, r /ɽ/, l

Fricatives: h /x/, ʃ /ɕ/, s, f /ɸ/

Nasals: ŋ, ɲ, n, m

Vowels: i, e, a, o (semirounded), u (semirounded)

There are also alternative forms for non-Roman letters, include English-keyboard-compatible ones:

ʔ: '

ɣ: ř, w

ʃ: š, z

ŋ: ň, g

ɲ: ñ, j

That makes the alphabet: a c e f g h i j k l m n o p r s t u w z

Most of these phonemes are borrowed from Japanese.

Phonotactics

I designed the phonotactics to make auditory parsing easier by ensuring that word boundaries are unambiguous while allowing words to be as long as desired.

The basic components are C, which is an initial consonant or cluster and can be any sequence of consonants without repetition, D, which is like C but has a double (geminate) consonant at the beginning, and V, which is any sequence of vowels.

All words are then CV, CVDV, CVDVDV, and so on. The idea is that D sequences allow a word to be continued with another vowel. However, because word boundaries are indicated with spaces, the double consonant is usually not written. For example, paŋŋa, which loosely means food, is generally written paŋa. The notion of a phonemic double consonant is also borrowed from Japanese.

Though I haven't done much with this yet, I'm thinking of adding to these rules that the above forms may end with C, so adding CVC, CVDVC, etc. Then the first consonant of the following word is doubled to indicate the word boundary. This is not reflected in the below examples.

Examples

To show how this all works, let's normalize some foreign words into this system (from General American). I also added the breakdown into moraic prosody (another element from Japanese) that I had in mind for pacing the words. If you aren't familiar with morae, they are roughly duration units the length of short syllables. I haven't worked out how to precisely describe the patterns for those yet, so it's based on intuition.

hi: hai (ha-i)

dog: take (ta-k-ke)

paper: peipre (pe-i-pre)

conlangs: kanleŋse (ka-n-n-le-ŋ-ŋ-se)

consonant: kansnente (ka-n-n-s-ne-n-n-te)

international: ʔentrneʃnle (ʔe-n-n-tr-ne-ʃ-ʃ-n-le)

phonotactics: fonotektekse (fo-n-no-t-te-k-kte-k-kse)

If any of this is interesting, I'll try posting more in the future. Thank you for reading!