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I'm constructing an auxlang/artlang (temporarily named Syn).

The Syn is (being) designed to interface with any known human language, with a wildly uniform set of simplistic, unambiguous symbols.

I have almost finished the phonetic alphabet component and have been trying to transliterate several languages into this while translating some that I know now on the side. However, since I'm not a native speaker of any of the transliterations and google translate is becoming not much of a help, I can't pinpoint the exact phonetic equivalent of some words. Now I'm running out of practice scripts from different spoken languages to accurately transliterate. Hence, I think I'm gonna need another language similar to what I'm making.

Are there any languages, written or spoken, natural or constructed, that occupy majority of the entire phonetic alphabet, with as little diacritics, as few ambiguous strokes, and as strict 1-to-1 symbol-phoneme as possible?

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  • "and as strict 1-to-1 morpheme-phoneme as possible" What does this mean? A language that only has single phoneme morphemes? I don't know of any that do that. Do you mean 1-to-1 character to phoneme instead?
    – curiousdannii ♦
    Aug 7, 2018 at 22:21
  • @curiousdannii There is Pleistocenese, with indeed roughly 1-to-1 morpheme-phoneme correspondence, however its phonemes are not quite what we call phonemes in current languages.
    – Radovan Garabík
    Aug 10, 2018 at 7:24

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You're gonna have a hard time with "majority of the entire IPA". Non-pulmonic consonants are rare, and some consonants are hard to contrast (e.g. /β/ vs. /v/), while vowels are often highly allophonic. Natural languages tend to have fewer IPA places and distinction via aspiration, labialization, etc.

My best answer to your question would be Ithkuil (constructed, almost unspeakable language). It has 58 phonemes, with unusually many vowels (13). This allows it to have mostly single phonemes for morphemes. Ithkuil's Roman transliteration is a bit strange, as some phonemes use diacritics and others have digraphs, but it also has its own script (morpho-phonemic with alphabetic characters).

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  • There are many languages with far greater extremes than Ithkuil. Even English has 12-13 monophthongs and 8 or so diphthongs.
    – curiousdannii ♦
    Aug 7, 2018 at 22:19
  • Yes, you are right about that. Ithkuil was mainly the answer because of the 1-phoneme-per-morpheme thing. Of course, if you look at characters-per-morpheme in Ithkuil script, the ratio is smaller, while it is larger in the Latin transliteration.
    – Cecilia
    Aug 8, 2018 at 5:37
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    I would like to mention that the original Ithkuil had a much larger phoneme inventory than the latest version. People seriously wanted to learn his language, even though he didn't actually intend for it to seriously be used. No one could pronounce the thing though, due to there being far too many phonemic distinctions. So he made another conlang called Ilaksh which had a far more reasonable phoneme inventory, but used tones to up the syllable count. After this, he decided that he didn't like having two conlangs with the same goal, so he merged them together into the current Ithkuil.
    – user348
    Aug 22, 2018 at 4:46

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