Wóhiská, Part One: Introduction & Phonology

Introduction

Wóhiská (/'woʊ.hɪs.kɑ/), or "People-ish", is among the latest in a long lineage of attempts to construct a natural language, nominally for use in a nebulous and ever-evolving world-building project. The capacity in which it has served me, however, has less been to express my bottled-in, megalomaniacal desire to play god over the destiny of entire worlds, but rather to (partially) educate me in the science of linguistics. While I admit that my knowledge in this field is still limited to the fancy of a hobbyist, I can’t help but to recognize my attempts as a continuous (and stealthy) learning experience.

Wóhiská has gone through several stages in its two-year development, originally conceived of as a secondary world Germanic language (with actual vocabulary and grammatical elements derived from whatever I could find in common among languages of that family cobbled together as I saw fit), it has gradually morphed to drop this affiliation in everything but phonetic style. It has now become a (nominally) a priori language being (re)developed from the ground up, with only a loose relationship to the previous forms (such as the name, as well as potentially some vocabulary).

This series is an attempt to formalize my efforts in developing Wóhiská through publication, in order that (should anyone stumble upon and become a regular reader of this blog) I should be held accountable for its continued expansion. I surely hope that happens, and to that end I have included in this article the basics of its phonology and an orthography for representing it in something other than IPA. I hope you are fascinated by what you find.

Phonetic Inventory

I debated for a while how closely I should match the phonetics of Germanic languages, but then decided to just go with whatever sounded best to my own ears (and which I could actually pronounce):

Consonants:

	Bilabial	Labio-dental	Dental	Alveolar	Post-Alveolar	Palatal	Labio-velar	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m			n				ŋ
Plosive	p b		t d					k g
Fricative		f	θ ð	s z					h
Approximant					ɹ	j	w
Lateral Approximant				l

Vowels:

	Front	Near-front	Back
Close	i		ɯ
Near-close		ɪ
Open-mid	ɛ		ʌ ɔ
Near-open	æ
Open			ɑ

Gliding vowels (also called diphthongs) include /aɪ/ as in English bright, /aʊ/ as in scout, /eɪ/ as in lake, and /oʊ/ as in boat.

Wóhiská also possesses a series of r-colored vowels, as in General American English as well as Mandarin Chinese. I thought it would be interesting because of its apparent general rarity throughout the world (I am still learning about them) to include them. The r-colored vowels are /ɑɚ/ as in car, /ɛɚ/ as in bear, /ɚ/ as in burn, /ɪɚ/ as in fear, /ɔɚ/ as in horse, and /ʊɚ/ as in moor.

The allophonic rules of Wóhiská are simple, with the alveolar nasal /n/ becoming the velar nasal /ŋ/ when adjacent to a velar plosive such as /k/ or /g/. I am also considering the inclusion of a syllabic consonant /ɹ/. I will undoubtedly add more as this language develops and I begin to form rules for word formation and stress.

Orthography

I would rather avoid digraphs wherever possible in favor of specialized symbols, so I have created a specialized orthographic scheme for Wóhiská. However, I am more than likely to create a simplified scheme for those without access to special keyboards or Unicode in the future. The symbol set is shown below:

Consonants:

Phoneme	m	n, ŋ	p	b	t	d	k	g	f	θ	ð	s	z	h	ɹ	j	w	l
Grapheme	m	n	p	b	t	d	k	g	f	þ	ð	s	z	h	r	y	w	l

Vowels:

Phoneme	i	ɪ	ɯ	ɛ	ʌ	ɔ	æ	ɑ	aɪ	aʊ	eɪ	oʊ	ɑɚ	ɛɚ	ɚ	ɪɚ	ɔɚ	ʊɚ
Grapheme	í	i	ú	e	u	o	a	á	ai	au	é	ó	ar	er	ur	ir	or	úr

As you can see, there are some digraphs still in use despite my dislike, but if I ever develop my own alphabet then these digraphs would be removed and unique symbols created for the phonemes in question. If I decide to include the syllabic consonant, then /ɹ/ would be |ŕ|.

At present, this represents a fairly comprehensive breakdown of the language, although there are some other less formal notes camping on my hard drive, but they are from earlier incarnations of the language that essentially copied from Common Germanic. You will see more of those, however, once I begin to write follow-up articles in this series. As always, comments and questions are welcome, and if there are any experienced eyes out there who might notice some mistakes or who might have advice then feel free to offer it below in the comments. Be gentle!

- Mark