Phonetic Inventory
- Give me an inventory of sounds for your language. Use the IPA to write them. This part of the assignment can be very simple; if you’ve decided your language has only two consonants and one vowel, for example, you could write:
p t u
(This would be a very odd language, of course.) If your language does not use sounds at all, that’s fine; you will just have to come up with some equivalent. What are the basic units, for your language? - Tell me something suprasegmental about your language. Does it have tone? Which tones? Does it have stress? What are the rules for stress?
- Tell me about the syllable structure. What restrictions are there?
- Give me a mini-dictionary of twenty words of your language. You can start off with a Swadesh list for inspiration (Wikipedia has one you can use). The words should be uninflected; don’t give me singulars and plurals of nouns, for example, or different tenses of verbs.
