komLang Consonants

The 19 komLang Consonants are divided into an easy set and a hard set. The most commonly used words use only consonants from the easy set. More advanced/specialized words come from the hard set. Only the 10 easy consonants are used in this tutorial (less for you to learn.)

For consonants, one character is used for one sound.
Which brings up the first difficult thing you need to remember:
x is not pronounced "ks" like "box", but "sh" like "Xi" [she].

The other difficult thing to remember is that "s" is a special reserved consonant. It is set aside for grammatical reasons (more on this later.) For now, know that "s" is pronounced as in "Sierra" and keep in the back of your mind that it will not be used for a basic root vocabulary word building, only to indicate pluralization (more on this later.)


Easy Consonant Set:

01. t - Tango    | plos
02. m - Mary     | nose
03. s - Sierra   | fric
04. l - Lima     | spec
05. k - Kilo     | plos
06. n - November | nose

07. f - Foxtrot  | fric
08. p - Papa     | plos
09. d - Delta    | plos
10. x - Shut     | fric
        (X is weird, but think of Chinese "Xi" is pronounce "She"


Hard Consonant Set:

11. z - Zulu
12. b - Bravo
13. c - Charlie (or church, never hard like K)
14. g - Golf

15. r - ri_ng_ (ng is a nasal sound, like M or N)

16. v - Victor
17. j - Juliet

18. u - _Th_ere (could be "aspirated or not" as in  _th_in or _th_ere)
19. q - Fere _J_acaue (or jud_ge_, soft French J)


Grouped by formant:

Nasal (3) : m, n, r [ng]

Plosive (6): p, t, k, b, d, g

Frictive (6): f, u [th], x [sh], v, z, q [zh]

Special (3) : l, c [ch], j

Reserved (1) : s (for pluralization only)


Rationale

I built up this consonant priority list according to the following considerations: 1. Easy (used in the most languages) come first 2. Distribution of formants I knew that Asian languages have difficulty distinguishing between "l" and "r" so I banned "r" from komLang. (L sings better than R.) If you do a "speech recognition" program, it will rarely make a mistake between nasals and plosive (it will rarely think you said "mitt" when you said "pit".) So it would be stupid if the 10 most common consants were 6 plosives and 4 frictives. I also tried to have a distribution of hi, middle and low energies (p, t, and d) in the first 10 consonants.

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