How does one approach phonology notation for a non-human constructed language?

A bit of background on what I'm developing: I'm trying to develop a language for an alien race with completely different biology to humans. It's still in the very early stages, so the exact form is subject to change, but they won't be making sounds with their mouths, but still through their breathing apparatus. They will have some kind of a vocal chords/flaps, likely either two or four pairs, enabling the use of chords/consonance and dissonance, and will be able to produce trills, plosives, and fricatives with whatever is closing the chamber, be that lip-like or flap-like. I was thinking to add other ways to redirect sounds, to mimick the effect of the tongue, but that does not make much sense outside of a mouth, and makes it needlessly more complex, so I will not be doing that.

I know for most constructed languages it is encouraged to use IPA for the phonetic side of things, but that is based on the way the human mouth and vocal chords work to produce sound, so I am not sure where to begin in notating sounds produced by an entirely non-human biology.

I think the easiest would be to just develop a writing system that takes these features into account, and explain how that system represents the sounds, but that restricts you to a featural phonetic alphabet-like script, and forbids anything like, say, a logography.

Unless you have something that serves the functions as IPA for human languages, developing the language (esp. morphological stuff) is hard.

So, if the writing system is not phonetic and cannot serve those same functions as the IPA, how do you represent those sounds in a usable and systematic way?

posted about 7 years ago

wleightond‭

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