#phoneme

@favorite-phoneme-creature

oooh that’s a good question,, thank you for asking!

/ɬ/ (voiceless alveolar lateral fricative) is my fav… I use every excuse to put it in a conlang. it’s super pleasing to the ear. it’s found in a lot of native languages in the Americas, as well as Africa, and rarely in European languages (Welsh people, you are the exception 🫶)

oh and also /x/ (voiceless velar fricative). I don’t know- I have a thing for voiceless fricatives. It’s pretty cool because it’s sometimes found in English (Scottish & Irish accents, etc)!

Phoneme Chart by Salem / Feline Wasteland / @felinewasteland

Continued in the experimental animation studio this week instead of trying a new workshop as I still had ideas I wanted to try it out in this medium. I was fascinated with the visuals of the book being animated and I wanted to work it into another moving image piece.

I researched the concept of phonemes. They are used by animators for matching mouth shapes to language sounds. I thought this was a good direction for my project as it was a very direct link between the imagery of the mouth and the expression of language

I used procreate to animate the phonemes for the word coilíneachas. I overlayed it on different pages of the colonisation book I used for the famine man piece.

After animating it, I edited the colours and tones to create a more saturated, vibrant image.

~ Phoneme Stop-motion ~

My short little phoneme stop motion. It’s not perfect but it’s cute and a little awkward and I enjoyed playing around with the concept of this sassy little lamp character drinking her coffee then saying ‘hello’.

I felt awkward recording my own voice so I added in some more sound effects as a distraction from the awkward silence leading up to that moment.

I spent a year working at a business in China, and part of my job was to learn conversational Mandarin. And, honestly, as a budding linguist with a few other languages already under my belt, learning Chinese was one of my favorite parts of my job.  

It wasn’t until I began learning Chinese that I realized a really important part of language learning that, in my experience, isn’t often emphasized in formal instruction.

When you are learning to speak a new language, you have to develop new muscles in order to produce the new sounds. And you do that the same way that babies do when they are acquiring language: lots and lots and LOTS of repetition of sounds.

My colleague would sit down with me in the evening and make me repeat the patterns from my book (seen above): 

b-a = ba 

b-o = bo 

b-ai = bai, etc.

p-a = pa

p-o = po, etc.

m-a = ma

m-o = mo, etc.

And on and on with all the other combinations.

And then practice different tones for each one. Over and over. For hours.

It was not exciting. It was tiring. At the end of the lessons, the muscles in my jaw would ache.