Pe King wrote:Hey I'm new to conlanging. My language is still nameless but I have the script and phonology worked out. My sounds are (in English) consonants P/K/D/F/G/H/L/M/N/R/W/Ch/Th/ change to /p t k b d g tʃ dʒ f θ h v m n l r w j/The vowels are A/E/I/O/U/. /Ph/ makes the sound of /B/. /Dh/ makes the sound of /T/. /Fh/ makes the sound of /V/. /Gh/ makes the sound of /J/. Rarely made /Wh/ will make the sound of /Y/.
Back to my question. I did the math and found that i could make only 340 VC or CV syllables. This syllabic format is the bases for my language and each syllable is going to have its own meaning. Like the word way/el/nay (Bird) literally means Positive(way) elevation(el) small animal(nay). CVC and VCV will be far less common or used when the 340 base syllables are used. A note VCV will be used used a lot more than CVC hopefully.
For those who want to see my script it will be posted soon.
VCV is not a syllable; it's two syllables, either V.CV or VC.V.
With 340 syllables you could get
115,600 two-syllable combinations,
39,304,000 three-syllable combinations, and
13,363,360,000 four-syllable combinations.
115,600 is about twice as many words as most languages have or need; 39,304,000 is more than 39 times as many as the number of English words; and 13,363,360,000 is just ridiculously large.
I don't know how you got the number 340. You have five vowel sounds (phonemes) and 13 consonant sounds (phonemes), right?
So, if each vowel could stand by itself as a syllable,
there are five "V" syllables.
If any combination of a single-consonant onset with a single-vowel nucleus and no coda is possible, there are 65 (=13*5) "CV" syllables.
Similarly if any combination of a single-consonant coda with a single-vowel nucleus and no onset is possible, there are 65 (=5*13) "VC" syllables.
If both of those are the case, then it's likely that any combination of a single-consonant onset, a single-vowel nucleus, and a single-consonant coda are possible; so there might be 845 (=13*5*13) CVC syllables.
845+65+65+5 = 980, a lot more than 340.
If any combination of two of those syllables is possible in a two-syllable word, you could have 960,400 two-syllable combinations plus 980 one-syllable combinations, for a total of 961,380 words of one or two syllables, almost as many as English has words, and more than are words in any dictionary of English.
Additionally, maybe your language could have some CCV syllables; there might be certain two-consonant clusters that could occur as onsets. That could be a lot less than 845 CCV syllables, and yet a lot more than 65 of them.
The problem then becomes how to divide the word or phoneme-string into syllables. There's no cross-linguistic rule; each language has its own rule (or maybe no rule at all). Is /bedofug/ meant to be /be do fug/ or /bed of ug/? Odds are your language has rules allowing only one of them. That will reduce the number of different two-syllable-and-longer words.
You also need to decide what clusters of vowels and/or consonants can occur in a word even if they can't occur in a syllable, that is, even if a syllable boundary must come between them.
If the first syllable is V or CV or VC, and the second syllable is also V or CV or VC, you could have any of:
V.V
V.CV
VC.V
V.VC
CV.V
CV.CV
CV.VC
VC.CV
VC.VC
as two-syllable skeletons.
Note the confusion over whether VCV is V.CV or VC.V. You'll have to have a rule to completely disambiguate that.
Note the two-vowel clusters in V.V and CV.V and V.VC and CV.VC. Are all pairs of vowels allowed as word-internal clusters, even though a syllable boundary has to come between any two vowels? If so, how do you tell /a/ from /a.a/, /e/ from /e.e/, /i/ from /i.i/, /o/ from /o.o/, and /u/ from /u.u/?
Note the two-consonant cluster in VC.CV. Are all pairs allowed? If so, how do you tell the difference between, say, /aba/ and /abba/?
Your language is almost bound to have CV syllables. If it has VC syllables it probably has CVC syllables, too. And if it also has both CV syllables and VC syllables, it probably has V syllables too.
If you don't allow word-internal consonant clusters and also don't allow word-internal vowel clusters, and every word must contain at least one vowel, you could have:
5 V words,
65 CV words,
65 VC words,
325 VCV words,
845 CVC words,
4,225 VCVC words,
4,225 CVCV words,
and 54,925 CVCVC words.
That's 64,680 different words, just barely more than most languages have or need.
With 274,625 VCVCVC words and 274,625 CVCVCV words and 3,570,125 CVCVCVC words, you exceed requirements with allowing three-syllable words.
But maybe you do allow a word to contain a single consonant-cluster, as long as it's only two consonants.
Then the syllable templates are among these;
V
CV
VC
CCV
CVC
VCC
CCVC
CVCC
Maybe you don't allow VCC or CVCC syllables, or maybe you do. Either way, probably you don't allow every pair of consonants to be an onset of a syllable, and probably you don't allow every pair of consonants to be a coda of a syllable. If you did, you could have as many as 24,640 one-syllable words.
Anyway, your two-syllable words could follow any of the following templates:
VCV
CVCV
VCCV
VCVC
CCVCV
CVCCV
CVCVC
VCCVC
VCVCC
CCVCVC
CVCCVC
CVCVCC
which gives you somewhere south of 2,429,700 two-syllable words (if all consonant clusters and all syllable-strings are possible); and that's plenty.
If you didn't get that from other people's posts, maybe you'll get it from mine.
