Introduction to Phonetics
Before we can take our language anywhere, we need to familiarize ourselves with the international phonetic alphabet. You know those funny letters in the dictionary that are supposed to tell you how to pronounce something but nobody can actually read? That's IPA (and linguists can read it).
It is imperative that you learn some IPA before beginning. Luckily, there are a lot of resources on the internet to help you out.
So I'll try not to reinvent the wheel here.
This is the IPA chart. Try not to get scared.
The large table has the "pulmonic" consonants; that is, they are made the normal way, by breathing out with our lungs through our mouth or nose.
The rows represent the way the sound is made in the mouth. For example, Plosives are sounds like t, p, and k, which have a sudden release of air. They are also called stops. Nasals and trills are fairly self explanatory. Fricatives are ones that have a continuous, but obstructed, airflow. Sounds like s, f, sh. So, the air is only flowing through a narrow opening which makes a hissing sound. The other most important category for our purposes is approximants--sounds like l and r. There is airflow, and it's unobstructed, but not so much so that it's a vowel.
The columns represent where in the mouth it's being made. The left side of the chart is the front of the mouth, and the right side is the back of the mouth, into the throat even.
So almost all sounds are a combination of where your tongue is and how much air is passing through.
The little nonsquare diagram on the right represents the vowels. The rows represent how much the mouth is open and the columns represent whether its made near the front or back of the mouth. Vowels come in pairs. The one on the right of the line is the one with rounded lips, and the one on the left of the line is the one with relaxed lips (o vs a for example).
The other letters outside of those two areas are sounds which are made by suction or other methods besides the "normal" way (such as clicks like in African languages).
Luckily for us, a lot of the letters correspond straight to what we are familiar with. Ones to watch out for are /j/ which is the english y sound (like German). /y/ is not an English sound. /r/ is a rolled r, not an English r. English r is represented by /ɹ /. There are other different ones too. J as in Judy and ch are not on the chart. They are "affricates," a combination of a stop and a fricative (J is d and the voiced sh... which is like the french J, ie Jean-Luc Picard. Ch is a combination of t and sh). They are written with the stop and fricative symbols touching. The vowels are also similar but different, so be sure to study them.
The reason I am attacking you with all this information is because the uninformed tend to be very narrow in their thought about what sounds a language can have. There are many, many sounds on those charts that don't occur in English, and we want them to be fair game for our made up language.
The best thing you can do now is familiarize yourself with the sounds. There are good videos on youtube for this if you want to go that route.
UCLA has a website that I used while in Phonetics class. You can explore the IPA there and click on the chart to hear the sound which corresponds to each letter, both syllable-initially and between vowels.
If you think you've got a good idea of how the IPA works, and have a better familiarity with the range of sounds in the world's language, then you are ready to move on to....!
Choosing Phonemes
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