Project 1

Purpose:
The assignment is to create your own language, starting with the inventory of contrastive sounds (phonemes), and some information on how sounds combine to form syllables.

This document should be read alongside:
• the Project Template (which you can rename and save and then use to build your answers). This is what you will upload to Canvas for the assignment.
• the Project Sample, which shows you what a final project might look like. The samples, though, are of a real language the professor is researching. Your sample will be of your own invented (constructed) made- up language, which should not look like English, or any other language you know.

Prerequisites:
In order to type phonetic symbols (not found in the usual ASCII range), you need three things:

1. A phonetics font containing all IPA symbols. There are many free resources. The standard font is DoulosSIL, available from the link on Canvas and at https://software.sil.org/doulos/. Be sure it gets installed into the appropriate part of your Control Panel or System Library. It is necessary to quit Word and restart the program after installing new fonts.

2. A virtual phonetics keyboard will allow you to press combinations of strokes on your physical keyboard to get an appropriate phonetic symbol. You can then switch back to the standard American
keyboard on a pulldown menu or creating a keyboard shortcut. For Mac users, please see resources on Canvas (Files > Phonetics > Phonetic Resources for Mac)
For Windows, try this “Unicode Phonetic Keyboard and SIL Fonts” virtual keyboard and font package, and map, separately at:
https://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/resource/phonetics.php
For Mac, Windows, and others, SIL’s Keyman and phonetic keyboards (try the top two options) may be found here, also with extensive help and documentation online:
https://keyman.com/keyboards/h/ipa/

3. A map of your virtual phonetic keyboard so that you can understand what strokes are necessary to input the appropriate symbol. For example, on my IPA keyboard, shift+s (at same time) gives ʃ, shift+d gives ð, shift+option+d gives ɖ, etc.

An easy way (for now) is to insert phonetic symbols is to use the following website to click and paste into your word processing document: https://www.internationalphoneticalphabet.org/html-ipa-keyboard-v1/keyboard/ Later, however, with more typing, you will want to use a virtual keyboard, not the above web utility.