Nineteen sounds

Say shea aloud. The word begins with one consonant, sh, then moves through two separate vowels: she.a. Its four roman letters record three phonemes and two syllables. That small example contains most of what this chapter needs to teach.

Phi has nineteen phonemes: five vowels and fourteen consonants. Ten consonants use one roman letter each. The other four use the digraphs ph, th, sh, and wh, but each digraph is still one sound and one syllable onset.

The inventory is compact enough to fit on two tables, though the effort will not be evenly shared. The vowels and several consonants occur widely across languages; /ɸ/, /θ/, and /ʍ/ may take practice. This chapter gives one careful pronunciation to work from, and the final page records the accent variants Phi already accepts.

The combining rules do much of the audible work. Syllables end in vowels, adjacent vowels stay in separate syllables, and stress falls on the penultimate syllable. Together they give Phi its texture: a stream over smooth stones, where each sound has room to be heard and nothing crowds or collides.

That is the entire sound system. Learn these nineteen sounds and the three rules that combine them, and every word in the language is within your mouth's reach, including the words nobody has coined yet.