so intonation right

im just wrapping up my final linguistics course (three more quarters and i have my bachelors woo!) and the topic is intonation.

it's the pitch contour of speech and how it relates to meaning on a sentence and discourse level. there are high tones that mark new information, low tones that mark established but still relevant information, and bi-tones that mark all sorts of things!

but then i got to thinking, wow conlangers dont do shit with intonation. so why dont i start? of course i decided to go way out there and develop an alien conlang that uses tones and tone contours to cover phonetic construction!

the conlang is called Felcaw, each letter either representing a tone or the shape a tone takes. for instance the f stands for a super high tone e stands for a high tone, and the l makes that last tone long. the c marks a super low tone, the a marks a medium tone and the w makes the a tone have a falling contour. every syllable has either one or two tones, the last of which can be altered in one of five ways.

f s l r and c are the tones not associated with contours, from highest to lowest. i e a u and o are tones that can be associated with contours/alterations.

the alterations are as follows: j = rising tone y= plateau w = falling tone h = truncated l = long. the "vowel" or "nucleus" tone is always longer than the "onset" or "consonant" tone, except when truncated, in other words, made shorter.

five times five times five is still only 125 syllables. luckily there are two major vocalizations the aliens have to double this on the basis of what we could call stress. Stressed syllables are tweeted while unstressed syllables are hooted. the aliens are giant raptors! there are also chirps caws and honks, but those are going to mark mood and only affect certain words' stressed syllables. stress in Felcaw is fixed and creates minimal pairs

"Fel" is their word for themselves, and "Caw" is their word for speech/language because i couldnt help myself lol. these aliens call themselves the Felsuj (s = high u = low j = rising) and are from the planet they call Felrih (r = low i = super high h = truncated). i forget which if any of these syllables are stressed. i think fel is but its not going to matter until i coin new words and stem syllables.

to place the Felsuj in a greater context: they will feature in an upcoming story of mine! thats right we're getting alienated haha hope yall like found family stories in space!

oh i might try and figure out a system for using intonation linguistics for conlanging and make a sort of how-to series. it will be focusing on using the ToBi (Tones and Break Indices) annotation system. look forward to it! that'll be all.