Week 2: The sound inventory
Every language uses a small subset of the sounds a human can make. Choosing yours, in IPA, and living with the consequences
1 March 2027
The heptapods in Arrival produce something the linguists cannot map onto a human vocal tract, which is the film being honest about a real problem: the sounds available to a speaker are determined by that speaker’s body. Louise’s team records the sounds and tries to segment them, and cannot. That is a realistic depiction of the problem.
A phoneme is not a sound. It is a distinction your speakers treat as meaningful — a category that separates one word from another. English speakers hear the first sounds of pin and spin as the same thing and they are acoustically quite different; a language elsewhere would treat that difference as the whole point. So the question is never “which sounds does my language have,” it is “which differences does my language treat as meaningful.”
Inventories vary enormously. Rotokas has around eleven phonemes. Several Khoisan languages have more than a hundred, most of the additional ones clicks. Neither is primitive and neither is advanced. What an inventory determines is what your words can possibly sound like, and you are choosing that this week for the rest of the semester.
Outline#
- phonemes against sounds, and why the difference matters
- reading the IPA consonant and vowel charts without memorising them
- inventory size, from Rotokas at one end to the click languages at the other
- picking yours, and what that commits you to in later weeks
The example language
This one is the course's, not yours. It is here so every subsystem has a worked example to point at, and it is the language you take apart in workshop 3. Yours starts from its own brief, and will not look like this.
Its speakers have no lips. Everything below is downstream of that one line in the brief.
| bilabial | alveolar | post-alveolar | velar | glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plosive | /t/ | /k/ | /ʔ/⟨'⟩ | ||
| nasal | /n/ | ||||
| fricative | /s/ | /ʃ/⟨sh⟩ | /h/ | ||
| lateral | /l/ |
| front | central | back | |
|---|---|---|---|
| close | /i/ | /ɨ/⟨y⟩ | /ɯ/⟨u⟩ |
| close-mid | /e/ | ||
| open | /a/ |
The bilabial column is empty, and stays empty. So does every rounded vowel — rounding is done with the lips, which is the half of the constraint most people miss. The inventory is eight consonants and five vowels because that is what the script in week 8 can draw.
- Syllable
- CV(n/l)
- Morphology
- agglutinating
- Word order
- subject-object-verb
You can watch it work in week 3, where the morphemes come apart, and in week 11, where most of them stop being said at all.
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor