Project 920

Before you can make words in any spoken language, you must have sounds.  This should be logical, otherwise a language can’t be spoken.  And to go along with those sounds, you must use letters or some other way of representing them, otherwise you can’t read a language.  This post will describe the sounds found in Project920’s language, and how they are represented.

First, the vowels:

a - Open front unrounded, /a/ – similar to as in Spanish, or in English ‘father’
ǝ – Near-open front unrounded, /æ/ – as in English ‘cat’
e – Mid front unrounded, /e/ – As in Spanish ‘bebé’
i – Close front unrounded, /i/ – as in English “free“
ı -Close back unrounded, /ɯ/ - no English equivalent.  The tongue is positioned as close as possible to the roof of the mouth without creating a constriction,  far back as possible in the mouth without creating a constriction, and the lips are open.
o – Close mid-back rounded, /o/ – as en English ‘pot’
ö – Open mid-front rounded, /œ/ - as en German ‘Hölle’ (Hell)
u – Close back rounded, /u/ – as in Spanish ‘tu‘
ü – Close front rounded, /y/ – as in German ‘blüte’ (blossom)

Stress

Vowels may be stressed.  When stressed, they are marked with the acute accent (e.g. á) if not umlauted, and with the circumflex accent (e.g. ô) if umlauted. The letter ı recieves the circumflex (î) when stressed, and the dotted i recieves the acute accent.  For typography reasons, the stressed ǝ is indicated by ‘ǝ.

‘Vowel Weakening’

The grave accent ‘weakens’ vowels. This may typically occur at the end of a word, when or in the beginning of a word.  A weak vowel is always unstressed. Three vowels may be weakened. This is indicated by the grave accent:

à – Close-mid back unrounded, /ɤ/ – Similar to Mandarin Chinese ’hē’ ( 喝, to drink), or e in English ‘the‘. 
ì – Near-close near-front unrounded, /ɪ/ – Similar to English ‘pit’.
ù – Near-close near-back, /ʊ/ – Similar to English ‘book’.