Creating A Language - Part 3 - Syllable Structure

Now that we have chosen our sounds, we need to figure out a few rules of morphology. Morphology is a wide field that in a given language has a lot of rules, so we are only going to think about a few. Even so, this is going to take a few parts to get through.
For starters, morphology is the study of the pattern of when certain sounds occur in a word or collection of words. For instance, a rule of English morphology is that we cannot have stops before nasals at the beginning of a word. "knife" has a silent k because it is a borrowed word, but the kn combination is not allowed (but it is in other languages, such as German). Another rule of English is that when we make plurals, that s can be an s, z, or ez. fish goes to /fishez/, cat goes to /cats/, and dog goes to /dogz/. /t/ is voiceless, so it gets voiceless /s/. /g/ is voiced, so it gets voiced /z/. And sh is a sibilant like an s, so you can't have sh and s next to each other, hence the insertion of the vowel. And then the s there becomes a z because the vowel is voiced.

In this part, we are going to begin looking at the syllable structure.

Syllable structure is looking at what combinations of vowels or consonants are allowed in a single syllable. Consonants and vowels are of course represented by present phonemes, not spelling.

English has a really lenient syllable structure. Pretty much everything is fair game.

We have:
I: V (diphthongs count as one syllable)
we: CV
tar: CVC
star: CCVC
start: CCVCC
are: VC
art: VCC
stray: CCCV
strait: CCCVC
strength: CCCVCC
sixth: CVCCC

(the plural s can make this even more dramatic, ie sixths, but morpheme -s is a special case, I hear).

Because all of these are allowable, but no consonant is required, English's syllable structure is (C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C) (or (C)(C)(C)V(C)(C)(C)(C) if you count that plural s). But this is not exactly normal for languages.

Let's look at Japanese (i will do this using multi syllable words):

a-ta-shi V-CV-CV
tsun-de-re: CVC-CV-CV*
un: VC

*I believe ts is an affricate, in which case, tsun would be CVC.

So Japanese's syllable structure is (C)V(C), with a nasal being the only acceptable consonant for the final one.

Some languages never allow the syllable final consonant and have the structure (C)V.

Some languages never allow the syllable final consonant and always require the initial consonant, and have the structure CV.

Some languages allow the syllable final consonant and always require the initial consonant, and have the structure CV(C).

Hopefully you understand the possible combinations now.
(Some languages defy syllable structure as we know it, but we aren't going to get into that).

 Figure out what combinations you want to be able to make with your chosen phonemes, and choose a syllable structure. While you can do something as free as English, I urge you to experiment with a more limited structure. In the next lesson, I will talk a bit more about how syllables work together to create acceptable words of a given structure.

1:3 Dalek Building

I started building a 1:3 size Dalek a couple weeks ago, and while I haven't gotten too far yet, I thought I would record my steps here so far. I am building an Ironside, so I am using these plans (opens a large pdf), which are just the plans for the 2005 Dalek design.

To scale down to 1:3, I simply divide every measurement by 3. The plans are meant for wood and other sturdy, thick materials, so I have made modifications to be able to use only cardboard and paperboard as much as possible. I decided to start by building the base ("bumper"). My friend and I cut all of the slats out of paper board (cereal boxes). It's important to label each one according to the plans, and to label left and right. The plan gives a set for the right side, so you have to draw them backwards for the left side.

After this, I built the flat part on top of the bumper that's between the slanted slats and the "skirt". I had to cut it out in four parts because it was so big. I then mounted it on a piece of corrugated cardboard for stability. The bottom of the skirt will sit against the inner edge of the paper board.

To build the bumper, I started by cutting out 22 wedges like so:

The left edge is the height of the vertical edge of the bumper (3cm in this case). The horizontal pen line is half of that (1.5 cm) and the vertical pen line is slightly longer (1.8 cm in this case). What's important is the angle of the hypotenuse, as that is the angle at which the angled slats will rest, and it must be correct for them to match up together around the bumper. Then 3mm were cut from the top to allow for the corrugated cardboard of the previous step to rest in there.

The next step is the glue the support pieces to the angled slats. I used painters tape to tape the hypotenuse of the triangle to the slat so that the corner meeting the long (3cm) side is flush against the bottom of the slat. The 3mm space is on the top. Once it is taped in place, I used wood glue to strengthen it. I used a right edge and another box to check that the support piece was straight up.

Each slat needs two support pieces, so once I had them both secured on at least one side with dry glue, I attached the vertical slat with more tape and glue:

Once it is dried, it looks like like this:

And that's how far I've gotten so far!