I see a dinosaur grinning creepily at me ... also I laughed at how your eyebrow rose at the uvular ejective XD - and your face at the palatal implosive was priceless XDD
I have been learning Esperanto for about 40 days, and I've got to that point creative people get to, that some of its annoying and unnatural features make you feel you could make a far better conlang yourself. When I started learning Esperanto, I thought perhaps I could do some creative writing in it some day, but it just doesn't sound particularly poetic, and so I thought that for fun I'd make a conlang well-suited to poetry, taking some inspiration from Old Norse and Norwegian, but retaining the case system of Old Norse for its poetically useful free word order. I started taking example words derived from my inspirational sources, but I've now decided to make mostly brand new ones that just sound like they could be Old Norse. That's actually not what I was going to comment on. I found your video series and thought it was highly interesting, both as a prospective conlanger, and just as someone who is interested in languages in general. I'll be watching through the whole list and then probably start over and make notes before I make any permanent decisions about my new conlang (which as yet has no name, but I might call it "Svelmoyi" after the first word Awkwords made for me based on my initial prospective phonology. It also came up with many other amazing words). Anyway, it's great how you try to encourage others to get into making their own conlangs.
Good question! You could certainly use IPA for some sounds that beatboxers make, but not all of them. The IPA is focused on (and best-suited for) speech sounds, not on any and all sounds humans can make with their mouths. Consequently there are some sounds beatboxers make that you couldn't faithfully represent even with all the diacritics the IPA has.
IskenThink I tried that once, it quickly became clear how difficult it is to create unique sounding morphemes out of only /p'/ /t'/ /k'/ in different rhythms, I.e. exceedingly. If you decide to try, don't make it too beatboxy or else it feels like speaking binary.
I've really been wanting to find extensions to the IPA that would be fitting because I think IPA would be incredibly useful for this. Basically you could either write the IPA as lyrics or you could assign a limited number of sounds to "instruments" and use drum-set-like notation. (It might be best to mix the two systems.) Here are the main problems I've noticed with applying IPA to beatboxing: a) The obvious gaps in the IPA table need to be filled, e.g., palatal trills, labioalveolodental stops b) Certain sounds and distinctions are not easy to mark with IPA, e.g., brass trills vs loose lip trills, sharp clicks vs affricated clicks (I can also can also make a trilled lateral click near the front of my alveolar ridge, which I don't know how to write even though I'm putting it in one of mu conlangs if anyone else can do it), exact placement of clicks including back released clicks, as well as all kinds of gradations like pitch, roundness, aspiration, etc. (graphical music notation tricks might be best for these last.) c) Although most sounds used in beat boxing are technically writable, many of them require so many diacritics that wod be very difficult to quickly recognize while reading music, e.g., [pʼʙ̥̝̆͡χ̟], [r̠̻̥̘ʲr̠̻̥̹ˠr̠̻̥̜ʷˤχ̃ʷˤ˥˩↓] (You may not be able to see all the diacritics on those on You Tube. Note I'm using that arrow for pulmonic ingressive airstream, i.e., breathing in.) Those last two problems can both mostly be solved by filling some holes and not trying to be too specific in the transcription though. Overall, I think IPA is already pretty good for describing beat-boxings sounds though. One easy fact that might simplify things is that almost all beat boxing sounds are unvoiced, so it might be possible to create a system that repurposed symbols using that assumpion; being to drastic with this would create a system that was definitely not IPA though.
Could have done with some info on how ejectives/implosives develop historically, and how they behave as a class of consonants, or something like that. I do like your 20min videos you know ;)
Honestly, they're pretty basic, where they occur. And mostly they pattern like stops. You will see implosives and ejectives coming from combinations of glottal stops and other stops, and also going into or out of other "emphatic" consonants (so, for example, where some languages will have /q/ others will have /k’/).
That /q/ vs. /k'/ is the Semitic correspondence, but /k'/ is original. Arabic, and maybe some nearby languages through areal influence, shifted glottalisation to pharyngealisation. Given that Arabic already had pharyngeals, this was a natural reduction of the gestural inventory. In fact the ejectives originally shifted to *voiced* pharyngealised consonants; two remain voiced today, but Sībawayh describes ṭāʾ and qāf as voiced as well. Many early Semitic reconstructions got the direction of the change wrong through overreliance on Arabic. The label "emphatic" was coined in the service of the cautious purely-comparative approach: "I have pharyngealisation here and glottalisation there and I'm not going to claim which one was original". I know of no example of a sound like [q] spontaneously glottalising (I mean to [q'], not to [ʔ]) and would be surprised to see one.
I may or may not have made an Phoneme Inventory with both ejectives and a lot of trills. /t'rolt'rol/ is the name of the language, and I must say I find it difficult to pronounce consistantly, but when I do say it right, it sounds lovely imo. I just love ejectives and trills, such rich sounds!
Fun fact - Sindhi, an Indo-Aryan lanɡuaɡe spoken in the Sindh province of Pakistan, has an entire series of implosives (labial, dental, retroflex, velar).
Whenever the International Linguistic Olympiad gets around to publicly releasing this year's problems, I'd like to see your reaction to them! I think you'd enjoy the team round problem in particular :-)
Could you do a video talking more in depth about your sign language transcription system mentioned in your book? It seems really cool, and I'm a little confused about the annotations s_h(I assume this means "shoulder"?), E^G, and bl in the S_h[K]E^Gbl example from the book. I'd also just love to learn more about the system and how you developed it.
I want to do videos about sign languages, but probably won't do one on my transcription system specifically, even if I use it. I did write the whole thing up here, though: dedalvs.com/slipa.html
I'm making a click heavy language, that has a few electives (t' k' q' ts'), and I wondered about implosives but I just find them so hard to articulate, whereas I find clicks and ejectives so much more fluid. When you consider the sounds it's somewhat funny from a Eurocentric perspective
I used to pronounce the voiceless uvular stop in Arabic as an uvular implosive. This might also account for the fact that the letter qaf is voiced in Persian.
Going to say "yes", but I don't have any specific examples... Geminate voiced stops often lead to implosives; I'm sure the same is true for geminate voiceless stops.
@@slamwall9057 No. cross linguistically, there are *more* languages that live on mountains that *have* ejectives because they are more easily produced in thinner atmospherse. Yapese language has ejectices and it's spoken on a small island.
I have made a conlang that only hath almost all ejective consonants there are, including ejective affricates and fricatives, and almost all implosive stops. Also, 'it hath all plain clicks, whilst excluding secondary articulation clicks. Those clicks happen allophonically. It's meant to sound nearly like mouthly beatboxing.
4:40 Based on physics, you said something wrong: The glottis has to lower and rarify air to pull air in. If it raises and compresses the air, that, in itself cannot be what pulls the air in. (When the stop starts, the air-pressure is the same inside the mouth as or out) I feel like you meant something other than what you said.
What would an almost fully nether and rounded kernelish vowel be written in the I.P.A.? Since there is no letter for that vowel sound in the I.P.A., I came up with an upside down with a little capital Æ. Likest thou what I came up with?
Navajo has an ejective tł', but this sound wasn't mention in your video. In the IPA as t͡ɬ', I found it at en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alveolar_lateral_ejective_affricate It is harder to hear the difference between ts and ts' and ch (tʃ) and ch' (tʃʼ) compared to p and p' and t and t' and k and k'.
6:24 hahaha, you keep saying the apa apa apa, that means daddy daddy daddy in my dialect, and by the way, my dialect is situated on hainan island of china, weirdly uses a lot of these implosives with tons of close syllables and glottal stops at word end
i know im really late and i doubt anybody will see this or respond to this, but any explaination of where implosives go as far as sound changes? im working on a protolang which has them but i dont like them much and would really like to get rid of them in most daughter languages. should i just turn them to voiced stops? that seems plausible but kinda lame
The Serer language of Senegal is probably the most widely spoken language that distinguishes voiced and voiceless implosives. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serer_language
well, this gives me more to add to the alphabet..... the next one. I cant change it now, because I have words and lore and all. but now I need 2 accent marks to denote ejective or implosive on top of the other modifiers.
The one language I expected to see it in (has a retroflex series and implosives), they say that it's sometimes pronounced as a retroflex implosive, and sometimes not. So I'd say it's pretty rare-maybe on par with the palatal and velar, even. Haven't looked at a crosslinguistic survey, though.
From a phonetic standpoint, whether air is being generated by the lungs or by the glottis. From an acoustic standpoint, one sounds a lot more forceful than the other.
I'm trying to make a secret semi logical language. I'm choosing ten consanats and ten vowles as sounds. Do you have any advice on getting started? I figure all Proper nouns, nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, will start with a letter corredpinding to what they are. something like that, but as a math major and not an english one I'm having trouble developing a system.
Yes: Reduce the number of vowels and increase the number of consonants. Also having all words start with its part of speech may prove limiting. Try it out and see if you like it.
Esperanto sort of does this except as a suffix: feliĉo (noun - happiness), feliĉa (adjective - happy), feliĉe (adverb - happily), feliĉi (verb - to be happy). All nouns end with -o, all adjectives with -a, etc. Granted, the part-of-speech marker isn't technically part of the root, but I don't see why it couldn't work. I mean if a language has 1000 words and 10 different consonants (let's say words have to start with a consonant), on average each consonant would begin 100 different words (although realistically some would be more common than others). I could easily imagine taking those same word forms and just reassigning their meanings so that all the p- words have to do with immaterial states, all the t- words are concrete objects, or whatever. One potential problem would be that since the sounds are grouped by meaning, similar words which may be confused for one another in quick speech/reading or a noisy environment also mean similar things and could lead to poor communication.
think of it like this: would it sound weird to have a language with only the following sounds: /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/, /ə/, /ɑ/, /ɔ/, /ɛ/, /ɜ/, /s/, /p/, /k/, /h/, /t/, /f/, /l/, /n/, /m/ and /ɹ/? And where everyone's name starts with a /p/ sound, every verb starts with an /e/ sound, every adjective starts with a /l/ sound, that'd probably be quite confusing
Bilabial clicks are _way_ rarer than ejective [p’]. I think the air volume explanation is probably right, even though I personally don't think it's any tougher to pronounce [p’] than [k’].
The implosives sound strange, and I'm not sure if I'm able to procude them (I usually don't consiously control the way my glottis moves). But maybe I can do it if I know of an example where these sounds are produced by speakers of english. Like, "somebody who is being choked" or "somebody who is drowning" or something like that. Can anyone come up with examples?
No, ejectives and aspirated consonants are quite different. Aspirated consonants are consonants spoken with a spread glottis, allowing air to escape after the consonant is pronounced. In an ejective the glottis is closed completely and then lowered to produce the characteristic pop of the ejective.
Ejectives aren't that bad; implosives are quite tricky. Still, though, if part of the fun of your conlanging is being able to pronounce your language and speak it with fluidity, then there's no reason to change things. :)
whenever i try to pronounce an ejective i keep inserting a pause between the consonant and the vowel when i know there’s a way to pronounce them without doing that. anyone know how to fix this?
try practicing rapidly opening and closing your glottis to stop/start a vowel (it resembles the “speaking into a fan” effect auditorially) if you want some fuck I already said the word practice what's a synonym
Did you not do them on the playground like I described in the video? That's the only place where I think we do them semi-regularly in English. That and the "glug, glug, glug" noise.
That's cool. So conceivably ejective and implosives could be used in a complementary distribution across the places of articulation, with regular plosives forming a middle series between them. e.g. ɓ ɗ ᶑ p t ʈ c k q cʼ kʼ qʼ In terms of a phonological history, maybe it could be modelled as two series that moved towards being implosive at the front of the mouth and ejective at the back, making ᶑ historically the same phonation type as c and ʈ the same type as cʼ.
