Talk:Conlang/Advanced/Sounds/Alien Sounds

Alien Phonolgy
What are some examples of animal vocal organs, and how could I design alien vocal organs so that it could make sensible and consistent sounds? How could I even figure out the sounds its vocal organs would make up the language. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.85.166.212 (discuss • contribs) 10:32, 8 April 2013‎


 * (Sorry, when we have a chance to work on this book we'd been concentrating on completing the earlier parts of it.)


 * Although it's limited only by your imagination, a simple technique that can produce quite plausible results is to suppose the aliens speak through their mouths, as we do, but their mouths are constructed differently so that they have different points of articulation. For example, C. J. Cherryh in the Chanur novels has a species called the Kif that have multiple sets of teeth.  Read up on how we produce our speech sounds, and you can dream up variations.  We have nasal sounds because our nasal cavity is also connected to our windpipe along with our mouth, what interesting variations on that might one devise; we have lips and teeth adjacent to each other at the front of our mouth; etc.  Once you get past mere variations on our speech apparatus, the sky's the limit.  --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 11:02, 8 April 2013 (UTC)


 * What if the sounds used are not meant to represent any sounds of Earthly life-forms? What should I do? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.85.166.212 (discuss • contribs) 12:43, 9 April 2013


 * Well, it's then a matter of deciding how your conspeakers make their sounds, and how those sounds would vary. There are a few possibilities suggested on the page here, though the page is clearly very preliminary and needs to be upgraded.  Let's see.  Sounds are often created by air moving inside an animal's body; I've the impression sea mammals can make sounds underwater by moving air from one internal chamber to another.  The three things (it seems to me, off hand) that actually make the sounds in such cases are friction, resonance, and sudden starting/stopping of airflow.  In human phones, friction = fricatives, resonance goes on in sonorants and nasalization, and sudden starting/stopping would be plosives.  What sort of sounds your conspeakers make probably depends on their biology, which depends on their environment and how they have adapted to it.  Their evolutionary history matters too; for example, sea mammals like dolphins and whales actually evolved on land, that's why they breath air, and then returned to the sea where they have evolved means of making complex sounds that can carry for hundreds (thousands?) of miles through the ocean but are still based on the breathing apparatus they developed when they lived on land.


 * You'll probably want to work out what kind of sounds your conspeakers might have evolved, and come up with a reading list of things to study up on in order to understand the background of the sound-generation and how it's likely to work. --Pi zero (discuss • contribs) 14:05, 9 April 2013 (UTC)

What are some resources I should use? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.85.166.212 (discuss • contribs) 23:04, 10 April 2013

Would all aliens use their respiratory system or would they use other systems like the digestive system to make phonemes? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.85.166.212 (discuss • contribs) 00:04, 11 April 2013

Examples
May you show examples of these non human sounds? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 97.85.162.133 (talk • contribs) 00:19, 13 April 2013 (UTC)