#disasterscenario

Not all letters in the alphabet perfectly line up with an American English letter or phoneme, so I tried my best to spell out the sound they make and include symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (which I hopefully used correctly; I don’t have much of a background in linguistics).

I made the decision that Martian is a tonal language that marks tone with dots on its vowels. All vowels must have a tonal marker, and there can be only one tone per syllable. There are five tones:

First tone indicates that the word or syllable is spoken low and level

Second tone is high and level

Third tone starts high and ends low

Fourth tone starts low and ends high

Neutral tone is either spoken flat or continues the tone of any syllable that comes before it in the same word

As you can see, one vowel only exists in the second, third, and neutral tones. This letter changes its sound depending on the tone in which it is spoken; the rest remain the same. Besides that, names tend to be neutral in tone.

You might have noticed that there are three different “rhotic” (r) sounds in this set of phonemes. That’s because R is a bullshit letter and I thought it would be funny to point out that a trilled R, a guttural R, and what we call a rhotic (American English) R actually sound nothing alike by having them all be distinct sounds in the same language. Why did I give Sasha a French R in her last name? Because she’s fancy and it looks cool.

Broadly speaking, the phonemes are built around Juno’s name; a meta joke. Another meta joke is that I only included a Q at all so it would be possible to make the word “Queer.”