gobble_ghoul [he/him]

Hey Russia, you’re all out of teenagers

Nope, butterflies are moths on day shift from an evolutionary perspective.

Maybe because in American accents, most of the schwas are R-colo(u)red or literally a syllabic /r/, while in most British accents they are plain schwas or schwa with an /r/ inserted after if the next sound is a vowel as in Panda-r-Express.

From an etymology standpoint, flower=flour.

Respectively, those words would be /kʌlə®/, /fleɪvə®/, /lɔː®/, /vəreɪʃəs/, /haʊs/. Sometimes “voracious” has the same first vowel as “lore”, but usually it gets a schwa. AFAIK “flavour” and “colour” always have schwa in the second syllable. All the words have roughly the same variations in pronunciation in both the UK and US.

I’m not aware of an accent where they would be pronounced the same tbh.

It’s pronounced to rhyme with “good” in Northern England, but then so are words like “mud” and “bud” as well. The distinction between /ʌ/ (as in “blood”, “luck”, “putt”, “bugger”) and /ʊ/ (as in “good”, “look”, “put”, “booger”) is called the foot-strut split. It developed in Southern England and was exported across most of the rest of the English speaking world without a consistent spelling between the two vowels having developed.

English used to have two vowels, /u:/ (as in “food”, “moon”, “loose”) and /ʊ/, which were usually respectively spelled <oo> and <u>, but /ʌ/ did not yet exist. At some point, people began to develop two different pronunciations of what used to be /ʊ/ - if the preceding consonant involved the lips and the following consonant involved the front of the tongue, it stayed /ʊ/, as in “put”, “pudding”, “wool” (which used to be spelled “wull”). Elsewhere, it shifted from /ʊ/ to /ʌ/, as in “luck”, “pup”, and “hull”. Both before and after this split occurred, some words which had /u:/ were prone to irregularly shifting to have /ʊ/ instead, including words like “look” and “foot” (ironically meaning that the foot-strut split is a misnomer since “foot” had /u:/ when /ʊ/ was undergoing the split). For those /u:/ words that shifted early enough, like “blood” and “flood”, they were actually eligible to undergo the foot-strut split, and ended up on the /ʌ/ side of things despite the <oo> spelling.

Variation between /u:/ and /ʊ/ continues to this day. In some dialects without the foot-strut split (and thus no /ʌ/), words like “foot” and “look” can still have /u:/. In dialects with the foot-strut split, some words like “room”, “broom”, “roof”, “root”, and “soot” can have either /u:/ or /ʊ/.

The spelling is bad mostly due to internal pronunciation changes in the language which weren’t reflected by updates to the spelling. That foreign spelling aren’t changed to match the native ones is largely due to the fact that the native ones had already become detached from pronunciation and speakers had developed a tolerance for ambiguity.

Doesn’t detract from your point, but I think you’re meaning “anthropocentric” lol.

Is that meant to be /æ/ as in “dad” or /ɑː/ as in “spa”? I find people do not agree on which sound the spelling <ah> indicates.

There are three variants I’m aware of: /eɪ/ as in “day”, /æ/ as in “dad”, and /ɑː/ as in “spa”. I personally say it with /æ/.

I still like Weavile, but Sneasel is peak. Sneasler is an abomination.

Definitely correct on me being a gremlin.

Sneasel.

The thing that gets me when I try to explain Spanish pronunciation to English speakers is that when I tell them the vowels are always pronounced the same way, it goes in one ear and out the other. You are literally making it harder on yourself by applying English spelling rules to it than if you just memorized 5(!) vowel sounds.

If it ever happens in the future, make sure to hit them with a “that’s not how it’s said in Catalan”.

The Spanish dialect closest to them does the “lisping”, in fairness. Historically inaccurate to call it a lisp, tho, unless you count English TH as a lisp as well.

Pretty much. Phonotactics, important geographic terms that are likely to be reused in multiple place names, a little bit of word order rules - like whether it would be the “Black River” or the “River Black”, and so on. As long as you keep some consistency, you don’t need to get into deeper stuff like conjugation, pronoun systems, how clauses are structured, and so on. George R.R. Martin is actually pretty decent at it, despite not being that interested in languages. Looking at random words from his books, you can usually tell whether something is supposed to be Valyrian or Dothraki just based on the aesthetics and the fact that there are some clearly related words.

David J. Peterson has talked about it a couple of times. Sometimes he’s allowed to coach people on pronunciation and other times he’s not. Sometimes in the edit they will change their mind about what they want the translation of a line to be after filming or splice together different lines, so even though they had him go through the effort of making a conlang and the dialogue, they fuck it all up after the fact by not making sure it matches what the final product says.

Side note, I always thought it was funny that they had the Dothraki repeating “armor” with two tapped /r/ sounds after hearing someone with an accent that doesn’t pronounce /r/ there say it. They apparently had understanding of English writing despite not speaking it.

More people need to learn how to make a naming language so they don’t have to worry about making a full-blown conlang.