Week Three

Hello again! I hope you are all having a great week!

March already! It feels like its was New Years just yesterday. The first day of March marks the end of week three of my project. This week, I worked on perfecting my vowels and have begun determining what consonants I am going to use. I’ve been using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) chart to help me determine what sort of sounds I want in my language. So far, I want my language to be able to be spoken by humans, so I am most likely not going to pick very many inhuman noises (i.e. bird calls, dolphin clicks, whale songs, etc…); however, animal calls are not out of the realm of possibility (which I will discuss later). I have been using an excellent website that shows a variety of different sounds in other languages. I have become fond of many sounds in Hindi, Russian, and the clicking sounds of Xhosa. I will provide the link to the site, should any of you be interested in listening to the specific phonemes (sounds) or words of other languages: http://phonetics.ucla.edu/index/sounds.html. 

  In addition to picking sounds in my language, I have also begun creating and perfecting my culture. They are most definitely superhuman and are going to be featured in a sci-fi/fantasy novel series I am working on writing. I am considering making them telepathic and perhaps giving them some avian qualities. After watching a hummingbird documentary in my macro-biology class this year, I was inspired to give my culture colorful feathers, much like hummingbirds. I may even give them wings. With this in mind, I researched the anatomy of birds vocals and discovered that, unlike humans, they do not have larynxes. Instead, they have syrinxes, which are located at the base of the trachea and replace the vocal chords of a mammal. Bird calls are produced through the vibration of the syrinx caused by airflow. I would love it if my language could possibly implement bird calls (I will not implement many bird calls, for I want a majority of the language to be able to be spoken by humans). I might give my species both a syrinx and a larynx. 

This week, I attended the Linguistics 150 class at the U of A and learned a great deal about morphemes (smallest unit of meaning in a language). Morphemes are not always words, for they may carry meaning but cannot stand alone as words themselves. These morphemes are called bound morphemes. Some, however, are able to act as words and these are called free morphemes. I also attended a meeting with the team working on Gaelic poetry. I have not made much progress on finding Gaelic words with hiatus, but I hope to do a great deal of work on that this week. I hope you all enjoy this first week of March! Thanks for reading!

English IPA Chart

Vowels/Phonetic Possibilities

                                             

Culture Ideas