Learn your ACE's, kids

When I was assembling the concise Koa dictionary and phrasebook for my girls at the end of 2022 I had to finally decide what the names of the letters were going to be. This was something I'd never had cause to think about in a conlang before. I decided that there was an opportunity here for the letter names to help avoid the kinds of acoustic pitfalls we see in some other languages -- on the phone, for example, where in English we have to say "S as in 'Sam'" and "F as in 'Frank'" because there's so much less acoustic differentiation at that level of compression.

The vowels were easy -- just the sounds themselves -- and for consonants I was fine with /e/ as the base vowel. A few other choices:

• Velar and glottal sounds (i.e. K and H) have an /a/ vowel both for ease of pronunciation and to differentiate K from P
• M uses the /o/ vowel to distinguish from N
• C uses /i/ to distinguish from S in speakers who pronounce C as [ts]

The whole alphabet (cóepo "collection of letters" in Koa), then, ends up looking like this:

A  C  E  H  I  K  L  M  N  O  P  S  T  U  V
a  ci  e  ha  i  ka  le  mo  ne  o  pe  se  te  u  ve

This may not be perfect. I sometimes sweat a bit about whether P should have been po to unify the bilabials, and also whether L and V could be confused in speakers who pronounce V as [w]. Should V be vi? I guess there's a part of me that starts to like the aesthetics less for some reason as an increasing percentage of the letters deviate from the base vowel. Let's leave an even more acoustically distinguished set of letter names on the table, should it seem necessary someday:

a  ci  e  ha  i  ka  le  mo  ne  o  po  se  te  u  vi

In the mean time, though, I've been marching on with the original 2022 letter names.

Note that instead of "ABC," Koa speakers have an ACE! This would be pronounced acié as an acronym. (In fact, are acronyms always accented on the final syllable like strings of particles? ETM, the acronym for e tei motoa "et cetera," could be shortened to etemó in speech; OVN, oo vala ni "oh my god" becomes ovené "omg." Seems solid!) Anyway, letter names and acronyms probably need the naming article le when integrated into syntax: opi le ACE! "learn your ABC's!", Ai »mene« me le M sa toa, ai »nene« me le N? "Was that 'mene' with an M, or 'nene' with an N?"

Last October I also did my best to compose an alphabet song for Koa: not usually my province, but it was kind of fun. There was a bit of a challenge in getting a 15-letter alphabet to fit nicely into a song, and I ended up adding five extra syllables at the end -- vo ka cóepo "that's the alphabet!" -- to play nice with the meter. The melody is very simple and also pentatonic*, on the grounds that as a scale it's comfortable pretty much anywhere; the range is a 9th, which is a full step wider than I had intended, but one could move the vo note up a 5th to A if necessary.

At first I wasn't sure how much I loved it but at this point I'm pretty happy with it -- I think it's just the right amount of cute for a Kindergarten classroom.

*I have a little anxiety that everyone's first impression will be that I'm trying to make it sound stereotypically East Asian. That is very much not the intention: pentatonic scales are about as international as you can get musically.