Anybody else working on conlangs with non-human phonologies?

[lurker]

If you're working on a language that isn't pronounceable by humans, how did you come up with the phonology? Is it in a medium other than sound? Can it be written? Can humans even understand it at all? Does it require more than three dimensions to perceive?

One of the first things I realized when I started conlanging, and still by far one of the coolest aspects of language in my opinion, is the concept of duality of patterning. You have a set of meaningless symbols (phonemes) that are assembled to make meaningful units (morphemes). These meaningless units need not be sounds produced by the human lungs and larynx. Signed languages already use a medium other than sound. Using 3D space and motion allows signed languages to be much more iconic and nonlinear compared to spoken languages. I wish I could learn a signed language but being blind makes that pretty much impossible :(

Anyway, one of my first attempts at a conlang used numbers as morphemes, with the integer part being the root and inflections expressed as the fractional part. Of course, since it was one of my first conlangs it was just a Latin relex.

Much later on I thought about using colors as phonemes, with saturation and brightness being supersegmental features.

Commonthroat started out as "what would a dog sound like if it had the faculty of language?" keeping in mind that a dog can't reproduce human speech sounds. It has evolved somewhat into a language for canine aliens rather than just canines. It took me forever to really move forward with it because I was approaching the phonetics from an articulatory angle. I spent so much time mulling over what the yinrihs' vocal tract would be like, but got nowhere. Then I realized that I was coming at the problem from the wrong end. In stead of asking myself what organs would be needed to make a particular sound, I should ask myself what each syllable would sound like. So I read an article on dog vocalization and listened to my dog while he slept. He's actually nearly silent when awake, almost to a fault, but he's super vocal when he's dreaming. He's also where I got the idea for the language in the first place. The word "yinrih" is an onomatopoeia of his quiet yipping and growling.

I had to cheat a little when devising the phonology, as dogs can't make nearly as many different kinds of sounds as a human. I used phonemic length, tone, AND volume to pad out the inventory. All in all, ignoring the length/tone/volume distinction, there are only six sounds, with whining, growling, and grunting serving as vowels, and huffing (a sigh through the nose), chuffing (a trilling purr-like noise based on the one tigers make), and yipping serving as consonants.

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Here's a list of languages by transmission medium

Pheromones
An Ant Language [in-language name to be determined]

2D Visual
Commonpaw

Color
2c2ef0

Nonhuman Vocalization
Commonthroat

[Khemehekis]

My Cetonian is spoken by the wama, sapient cetaceans from the planet Cetonia (Wuiou in Cetonian; the name "Cetonian" is an exonym in Lehola Intergalactic English). It makes use of eight syllables spoken through the wama's blowholes, rather than through a human-like mouth. The syllables, approximated for human ears, are ha, ho, hui, ma, o, u, wa, and wui, and then there's a "click" to separate words.

Some of my Leholangs (= conlangs from the Lehola Galaxy) make use of syringeals and birdsong-like sound, such as those of the parrotpeople of Psittacotia or the reptologues known as the biwi.

Hexamantoids are native to the planet Twpia in the solar system Urinia. These are six-limbed mantis descendants. They have two legs and four arms. The top two arms they use as we use our arms. The middle two limbs are their language arms. Each Hexamantoid has nine grooves in one of its middle arms that can be played musically with the other arm (the latter of which functions like a violin bow). 80% of Hexamantoids have the grooves in their right arm and play with their left arm, while 20% have the grooves in their left arm and play with their right arm. The grooves go from biggest on the top to smallest on the bottom. Much like the bars on a xylophone, the biggest grooves make the deepest notes and the smallest grooves the highest notes in their enneatonic scale. The notes, from deepest to highest, are transcribed a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, and i. Some languages have two or three chronemes, indicating that a note is held longer. A normal c would simply be transcribed c; c held longer would be transcribed c2; and the longest chroneme for the note of c would be transcribed c3. A tacet (denoted with a space) separates words.

Hexamantoids do not use their vocal cords to communicate the way humans do, even though they can beatbox with their throats in addition to their a cappella speech and their fashioned musical instruments. The name Twpia comes from a proxy language spoken by the natives of Natwri, Twpia's neighboring planet. Natwri's sapients are tubans, much like the Domeheads of Bodus, although they come from a different class in that phylum, one with hair (so they're about as different from Bodusians as mammals are from reptiles). The musical languages of Twpia's Hexamantoids do not transliterate into human languages, so all the place names, species names, etc. on Twpia come from the languages of Natwri.

The tamepo, sapient cephalopods of the planet Syprian, change color as a means of language.

[Creyeditor]

I think I understood most of the post, except are Tubans bony fish or flatworms? (Or does Tuban not refer to any species on earth?)

[Khemehekis]

I think I understood most of the post, except are Tubans bxny fish or flatworms? (Or does Tuban not refer to any species on earth?)

Tubans are a whole phylum, the vertebrate-analogue phylum on such planets as Bodus.

[sangi39]

Sort of? I'm "working on" (it's been five years*) non-human languages for a species called the Kovur, who exist alongside humans on a planet called Yantas

What they can pronounce and what they can't pronounce isn't hugely different from human phonology, but there are some notable differences:

1) They cannot pronounce sibilants, while humans can
2) They cannot pronounce labiodentals or dentals, but they do make much wider use of bidentals (pronounceable by humans, but I imagine they're often substituted for more common sounds within human languages)
3) They make much heavier use of lateral fricatives (which, again, I imagine a lot of the nearby human populations switch out for the equivalent sibilants, and, vice versa, the Kovur might tend to pronounce sibilants in human languages as lateral fricatives)
4) The Kovur are, in general, capable of pronouncing a wider variety of of coronal consonants, by POA, than humans, and the same for vowels (meaning that human languages might merge many Kovur sounds within this range), while the Kovur also tend to make fewer phonemic distinctions amongst dorsal consonants (by POA) of the same MOA, than in human languages

So it's sort of "human phonology, plus some things here, minus some things there". The main difference is meant to be in the way "grammar" is built up, to be fair



*my conlanging for the past, oo, two decades, has been very on-and-off. I'll have one big moment of getting a fair bit of stuff done, then it'll fizzle away for a few years, then I'll go back to it

[Creyeditor]

I had the idea for a language of sentient Hoatzins but I haven't really worked much on the phonology. My main idea was that there is less duality of patterning and words describe whole situations and can only be connected or modified by a limited amount of function words.

[Kelisot]

I tried making a language for a god involving creation (and emitting radiation). It isn't as easy as I expected.

[Arayaz]

2c2e19

[LinguistCat]

I'm considering whether and how I'd make Nyango less human in phonology. It's based on Old Japanese and in universe develops alongside the Japanese language, however, it is spoken by cat youkai, some of which can transform to look/sound/act human and others who can't. So I figure some of the allophones would vary between human and cat pronounceable forms.

My other idea was to adjust the phonology of Old Japanese to be more "cat-like" and then develop things through sound and grammar changes over time. I might even combine both of these ideas, since they're not exactly mutually exclusive.

[lurker]

I tried making a language for a god involving creation (and emitting radiation). It isn't as easy as I expected.

Do you mean creating things ex nihilo to use as phonemes? How would that work?

[Kelisot]

I tried making a language for a god involving creation (and emitting radiation). It isn't as easy as I expected.

Do you mean creating things ex nihilo to use as phonemes? How would that work?

Yes. It slightly ties in with my conworld, but my god can do that. One of the phonemes is the birth of a star, by the way.
Although, I think that can be a tone marker.

[pachelbel]

My "humanoid" alien species Cave Angels can't breathe through their mouths (they breathe through spiracles at the base of the neck), so they produce airflow for vocal sounds using a bellows-like vocal sac that occupies the space where a human's nose and sinuses would be, and which has a slit opening into the roof of the mouth. Effectively this means the front half of their vocal tract is pretty humanlike (similar lips, chitinous ridges where human teeth would be, similar tongue dexterity) but the back half is absolutely not.
The sac's capacity is also much smaller than human lungs, but since it has no breathing function they can also make sounds on the "inhale" as well as the "exhale", and this distinction is phonemic in some Cave Angel languages.
Their back vowels are unpronounceable by humans and I'm not even sure what they would sound like. Someday I'd like to make a 3d printed model of their vocal tract just so I can figure out the Forbidden Vowels. (Likewise, our back vowels are impossible for them.)

Then for something completely different I've got the Ruins Cats' language, spoken by sapient but physically-normal feral cats. It's half vocal (meows/trills/chirps/purrs/hisses) and half signed - and many of the signs require a tail, so even if a human got down on all fours to sign and imitated the noises, much of the signspace is impossible for human anatomy.
I have a notation for the sounds and signs, inspired by humans' SLIPA, but the Ruins Cats have no written language themselves.

[eldin raigmore]

If you're working on a language that isn't pronounceable by humans, how did you come up with the phonology? Is it in a medium other than sound? Can it be written? Can humans even understand it at all? Does it require more than three dimensions to perceive?

I think I probably need to; but I haven’t yet.
My first conworld, and longest-lived in internal story-time as well as real-life I-should-be-working-on-this time, contains numerous non-human loquent species. But as near as I can remember, each of those species might be able to pronounce any utterance in the language of any other of those species.
At any rate, most of them are fluent in the Lingua Franca of their conworld, and are mutually intelligible.
But, maybe, those who can’t pronounce some phoneme or phoneme-cluster in one of the other species’s language, may have developed standard substitutes pronounceable by their own speech-organs, and those standard substitutions have been widely learned by members of the other species.

In my own real life, I have several times needed to communicate with someone else whose dialect was noticeably different from mine; in word-choice and/or pronunciation and/or word-order and/or maybe other ways that don’t readily come to mind at the moment.
In each case, we understood each other perfectly, even though each of us said things in ways that the other would never use.
….
I think I also need to work out other media, such as signing. At least I want to establish that these other channels are used! Even if I never completely work out their “phonology”-analogs, nor their vocabularies, nor their grammars.
….
Thanks for asking a good question!
And thanks also to all the other responders on this thread!

[Visions1]

Once thought up a language for marsupials on an almost-entirely flooded planet with fricatives galore and loads of places of articulation - but not plosives. Only affricates, if the language had them (there would be several).
I didn't do much with it though. The world is still in the back of my head.

[Visions1]

Posting these two:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vahlnBkVUA
https://fiatlingua.org/tag/madeline-palmer/

[lurker]

Posting these two:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vahlnBkVUA
https://fiatlingua.org/tag/madeline-palmer/

I've seen that video. It reccommends going for an articulatory approach, but I found it easier to think of how I wanted the language to sound from the listener's perspective first.

[Visions1]

Truthfully, the most valuable thing to me was just seeing a crow phonology. I can kind of make one on my own, but at the same time, it was much better to see someone else's work, since they'd find things I'd miss.

There was this book I saw at a thrift store yesterday about synthesizing speech. Exactly what you'd be able to read, but exactly what you wouldn't want.

[Arayaz]

Earlier today I was struck with a sudden desire to make a language for tuataras. I'm not quite sure why, and I have exactly no knowledge of tuataras. But I still want to do it.

[Pabappa]

My speakers are humans, but my languages tend towards exotic phonologies. I've never really had a good explanation for this, but lately I've been saying that it's because humans in my world are just now evolving the anatomy necessary for speech, and therefore each group of people is evolving towards a different norm. That is, when a language undergoes sound changes, it is stable in that path rather than needing to revert towards a baseline. Thus Play with its heavy use of labials and /a/ sounds like baby talk to us, and even to other humans on the planet, but its descendants Poswa and Pabappa evolve even further in that direction rather than reverting back to sound more like the languages around them. Other languages such as Andanese also sound like baby talk but in a different way: in this case, not so many labial consonants, but only thirty syllables in the inventory.

Earlier, I had planned to have the capability for language carry over from pre-human animals, and therefore there would be fully functional spoken languages for non-human apes, with phonoloogies that are almost but not quite human. There is a tiny bit of residue of this idea in the phonology of MRCA, the ancestor of the major human languages .... there is an unusual series of /tʷ nʷ ndʷ/ but no corresponding labiovelar series as one might expect. This was originally /tl dl ndl/, as I had planned the last pre-human language (the "stem" language) to have a rich series of laterals, due to different shape of the tongue, and that these therefore could not be velar, so this resulted in labialized consonants in the first human language. I dont plan to do this anymore, and the sound changes no longer require laterals as a precursor to the labialized consonants.

Though most of my languages have small phonologies, some of them make distinctions that we would consider difficult. Here I can say that both the speech anatomy and their hearing is primed to pick up on these distinctions whereas ours is not. Earlier I had had a language with fifteen tones, for example, though now the most I have is five register tones in one language and six word tones in another. I have plans for minor languages with up to four labial series ... /mʷ m mʲ/ based on lip shape, and then a labiodental series contrasting with the other three.

This post is a bit of a mess, I know, but basically Im saying I have the basis in place for non-human phonologies but that all of the speakers of those languages would be anatomically human.

edit: also, i keep forgetting about linguolabials, which i used in a very early project (with a Pluto symbol for the stop), and then discarded as I moved towards simpler phonologies. Now, I think linguolabial consonants have a part in my languages after all, even in those with smaller phonologies, but they will be rare phonemes the way uvulars and labiodentals are to us.

[lurker]

So I'm trying to dredge up all the conlangs on here I could find that don't use the human vocal tract. I know there's a color-based language on here, too, but I can't find the topic via searching. Feel free to suggest more additions, even if they're just sketches.
Pheromones
An Ant Language [in-language name to be determined]

2D Visual
Commonpaw

Color
2c2ef0

Nonhuman Vocalization
Commonthroat