Week 2 Workshop: Choosing your sounds

The workshop where your language stops being an idea — you fix an inventory in IPA, then pronounce every sound in it to the group

4 March 2027

Before the session#

Watch Arrival. Print an IPA chart and bring it with you. Laptops are fine for everything else in this course but not for this, because you will be pointing at symbols while somebody else makes the sound.

In the session#

We start with forty minutes of the chart itself, in pairs, working across the consonants by place and manner until the grid stops looking arbitrary. Then you draft your inventory.

In the last twenty minutes you will be asked, without notice, to produce any phoneme on your own list. This is not a test of performance. It is how you find out whether you have included a sound you cannot actually make, which roughly half of you will have done. It is much easier to fix now than in week twelve.

Afterwards#

Post your inventory. From this point your language has a fixed set of raw materials, and every word you invent for the rest of the semester has to be built out of them.

If you want to change your inventory later you may, once, and you will have to rewrite everything you have already made from it. That is not a penalty; it is simply what changing a phonology involves.