#letshaveabouba

This is another series of days that I am combining, which henceforth shall be called “Consonant Day.” According to the prompts, these days task you to “choose series of consonants to incorporate, decide whether consonants will have a voicing distinction, and research other places of articulations.” Conlang Year is set up to give the participant plenty of time to do research and gauge what sorts of elements that they wish to include in their language, which is an excellent feature for beginner conlangers. On the flip side, I really enjoy creating phonologies for languages that may never occur, just as some practice to see how the values lie, whether it could be a potential language to explore.

The phonology for this language is one I made in one of these experimentation sessions with not really an expectation, but it’s one that I latched onto and one I wanted to save for specifically this. I’ll present my thought process over these three days and present the vowels on Day 15.

I start all my shit-shooting (that is literally what the folder is called where these are birthed) with this template system starts:

I started by editing out some of the less common phonemes, because for this one, a minimal phonology was desired. The affricates were gutted and the dental, lateral alveolar, palatal, and uvular consonants were nearly completely removed, sparing the glide /j/. The velar nasal /ŋ/ was, unfortunately, among the consonant crew that was cut. It’s less common than the others present, especially in word initial forms.

Generally, I did not want a voicing distinction: too many consonants. The voiceless ones were chosen since it is uncommon for there to be only voiced consonants in natural languages. For the bilabial fricative, however, the voiced fricatve /v/ was elected over the voiceless one /f/.

When it comes to other articulations, the alveolar approximant, or the rhotic in this case, is shown here as a trill /r/, yet I wanted to weaken that a little more to the tap /ɾ/. As @quothalinguist had mentioned, the sound /w/ is a coarticulated labial-velar sound. The velar column was expanded to include the labialized velar stop /kʷ/. With that expansion, the consonant chart is complete!

In 2024 Sophie's eponymous and posthumous album was released. A pioneer of hyperpop and an inspiration to many a queer, her influence permeated Charli’s music and modern pop as a whole.

In Club Classics, Charli references some of her closest collaborators: “I wanna dance with George, I wanna dance to SOPHIE”. In her music, Sophie lives on.

The proto inventory they came up with is this:

In their documentation they put /a/ as a low central vowel, so its a classic 5 without /e/, but I decided for me I'll make it a square system, it'll make vowel stuff easier for me - so /i/ /u/ high, /æ/ (a for ease) /ɔ/ (/o/ for ease). I also interpreted the back consonants as +pharyngeal, and split the back non stops as one being a fricative and thr other an approximant, instead of having both be both.

regarding syllable structure, they came up with CCVT. I elaborated on it and made it #CC-VCCV-T#, which stands for:

initial cluster of any 2 different consonants allowed. yes, every cluster, even /jqa/ is allowed, but /tta/ is not.

intervocallic clusters of any 2 different consonants allowed, no 3 or more consonants in a row. so /aqba/ but not /ut.ska/

word finally only single consonants allowed, and specifically only alveolars. /klat/ not /pgum/

regarding sound changes, they talked about tone, and having epinthetic vowels breaking up initial clusters and vowel lowering. These are the sound change I came up with to achieve these goals, and some other stuff that seemed cool to me:

Tonogenesis: high tone after voiceless consonants, low tone after voiced. A voiceless consonant preceded by a voiced one gives low tone, and voiced preceded by voiceless gives high tone: /tá/, /dà/, /ntà/, /kná/. Im pretty sure something similar happens in tibetan, but it has aspiration involved, and im not going to have that, so this is only inspired by it.

voicing assimilation: stops and fricatives assimilate to the voicing of a following consonant of the same cluster. now tone is phonemic :) yay: /kná/ > /gná/, /ztì/ > /stì/, but /ntì/, /lsì/ stay as is.

pharyngeal spreading: a consonant in a cluster with a pharyngealized or back consonant become pharyngeal aswell: /psˁì/ > /pˁsˁì/, /ħɡʷà/ > /ħɡʷˁà/.

epinthetic vowel insertion: a vowel is inserted between all initial clusters. its quality depends on the surounding consonants. if one of them is palatal its /i/, if one of them is labialized velar, its /u/. if its both, it depends on the initial cons. else its /a/: /ctú/ > /citú/, /skʷò/ > /sukʷà/, /wɲù/ > /wuɲù/, /tkú/ > /takú/. idk what tone the new syllable gets I haven't thought about that.

pharyngeal lowering: vowels are lowered as follows after pharyngealized and back consonants: /i/ > /e/, /u/ > /o/, /æ, ɔ/ > /ɑ/. now we have 7 phonetic vowels - /i, u, e, o, ɛ, ɔ, ɑ/ yayyy yippee I love big vowel systemsss!! /tˁicˁá/ > /tˁecˁɑ́/ etc.

/ji/ /wu/ > /i/ /u/: because I don't like those sequances. I also think /wra/ >> /urà/, /jki/ >> /igì/ is pretty cool.

Here the current inventory after these changes:

and a few notes:

phonemic destinction between H and L tones

kept the lowered vowels allophones. You could just make pharyngealization go away and phonemicize the vowels but I like this gigantic inventory better lol

Potential /q ħ ʕ/ > /ʔ ∅ ∅/, to make the vowels phonemic. maybe /q/ > /k/. or even /q/ > ∕∅/ aswell?? it'll be a bold decision to make

syllable structure - #CVCCVT#. Initial clusters are now forbidden, but everything else is the same. I think V{j, w, ɰ, ħ, ʔ}C can lead to vowel length or more qualities or something, the sequance has potential.

So yeah this is all the ideas I have in my head rn, I hope it was an interesting read lol. I also recommend you go and watch the streams yourself, the vibe is very nice and help the creative juices flow, like I'm really happy with what I came up with here based on their protolang. it was like a fun colab challenge thing :) here's a link to the channel:

Boys and girls can all be queens every single day. Don't we all want to be at the Pink Pony Club?

In this previous post, there were five postpositions that became used as case marking late in the language’s development. The semantic erosion of these former postpositions induced new phrases that used body parts or terrain terms to show the relationships between an object’s location. Depending on the postposition to be used, a noun is usually either the locative or instrumental case, while some meanings may be extended if the dative case is used.

ibê – “head” → on top (locative) ; off of (dative)

eege – “tree root” → under (locative)

nooḍọ – “chest” → in front of (locative)

kwuunụ – “back” → behind (locative)

dá – “peak” → over (locative)

moo – “cave” → inside (locative) ; into (dative)

usu – “sea” → out (instrumental)

ọọme – “tide” → away from (instrumental)

níí – “current” → toward (instrumental)

izi – “sand” → around (locative)

 Let's talk about shapes while the song Kaldeidoscope let's us take 'shape' as the word for today.

When we named Let's Have a Bouba we didn't expect kiki-bouba to become as integral to the languages we made as it did. We can thank our patron Danielle for the suggestion as it has sent us in quite a unique direction with N'asibómmó.

We've actually got to day 365! In some ways this isn't a great Lexember entry - we had worked out how numbers worked weirdly early, as LHAB is want to do. However, we have both given bountifully and at some point needed to do a little number moment.

N'asibómmó uses a base 20 system, with a sub-base of 5. Relative to the rest of the language, this is one place where the derivation of the numbers occurred before the first true sound changes from roots, creating series like mzo (5) maz'ú, (6) mas'al, (7) mzî, (8) mdo. Thus suggested that this number system was well developed already and we have kept it quite stable over time.

Gboró ksǔ mzo breaks down as follows, with the numbers in brackets in decimal: gboró (19) x ksǔ (20) + mzo (5).

Picture You is a curious song in which the subject of the song is never quite clear. Is she singing about lighting candles for herself or another person?

Candles are obviously made from wax, and it's established if anyone is familiar with the relay from earlier this year that bees are a part of the Boubaverse. As a result, we went with deriving 'wax' from 'bee'. Wax as a semisolid substance doesn't really lend itself to form based classifiers, but cute little round bees can take a nice -bo marker as borrowed from Kongwa. As a result wax is 'za'ón' and bee is 'za'ómbó'. (Za'ómbó papi za'ómbó)