#langtime studio

The original inventory:

Consonants

First thing I did was to rearrange the table to include a seperate row for pharyngealized stops, and add seperate columns for the labialized consonants.

3 things that jump out to me first:

There are pharyngeal labial and alveolar stops, but no velar or uvular. I think collapsing th uvular and velar columns under "dorsal", and leaving a note for future sound changes that the fricatives and pharyngealized velars are technically uvular is a good way to "fill the gaps" and make the table more compact.

I don't think it's that important for the plain unvoiced stop to be written as aspirated, just another note for the pronounciation guide like the uvulars.

because labialization comes in this phonoloy as a set I think it's fine to have /ʟʷ/

I also changed "alveolar" to dorsal, because /ɹ/ can be either alveolar or postalvelar, and also that wording fits the vibe I'm going for, more on that later.

After those changes we end up with this:

After that I got rid of the pharyngeal fricative, because it's out of place, with pharyngealization being a feature of stop only, other than it. I also think that it's not very needed from a sound change point of view - I think that the dorsal fricative can make anything that the pharyngeal one could.

Using the terms "dorsal" and "coronal" reminded me of Australian languages, and that reminded me of how they are usually grouped there into a natural class of "peripheral consonants" that share similar features. That gave me the idea of making labialization a feature that is exclusive to the periphral POAs. There are many labio-velar consonants, and there are more "velo-labial" ones than labial alveolars (/mʷ w/ vs /ɹʷ/, so I think it fits.

That decision removes /ɹʷ/, and gives us /bʷ bʷˤ ɸʷ βʷ β̞/

Because the distinction between /β/ and /β̞/, /βʷ/ and /w/ isn't very strong (and I can't really hear it, I dropped the fricatives.

I also dropped the unvoiced bilabial ficative, with the idea that each POA some of these 4 features - voicing distinction in stops, nasals, fricatives, and labiolization:

Dorsal is the "Strong" POA, having 3 out of the 4 - labialization, voicing of stops, and fricatives. (I also remember Jessie saying that she feels like the dogs will use the back of their tongues more, so dorsal being strong here fits that.)

after that is Bilabial, with 2 out of 4 - labialization and nasal vowels.

And last but not least is Coronal, the "Weak POA", having only one of the 4 - Voicing distinction in stops but no labialization, fricatives or nasal stops.

That leaves us with a final proto-consonat inventory of 25* consonants:

*I thought about dropping /β̞/ aswell because I feel like it's not that distinct from /w/, but I'm not 100% sure either way.

Vowels

There isn't much to say in this section. Jessie suggested a 4 vowels system which I think is a neat idea, so I think this system is a nice fit:

With all the labialized and pharyngealized consonants I don't think it'll be hard to get a lot of back vowels, and having 2 front vowels can give us a lot of front round vowels which I like.

Thank you! I use two programs—one of which is slightly embarrassing: FontLab 8 and Keynote. Keynote is a native Mac application that's the equivalent to Windows' PowerPoint. >.< I was never very good at using actual graphics applications like Photoshop or Gimp. Keynote, of course, is not actually intended for real graphic design, so it doesn't have a lot of features, but it has enough to do what I want to do, most of the time.

So we have these eight flags:

The actual detail parts are all done in FontLab. They're a part of a large font I use for the icons in the board game we're working on, with each icon assigned to a keystroke or combination of keystrokes. You can see some of the bits here:

Then if you actually click in to one (e.g. the mouse charge) it looks like this:

All of this is literally copy and paste, drag and drop, and math. FontLab does have some very useful basic automations built into it (e.g. removing overlapping bits so they become the same layer) and some more advanced ones that I've occasionally found useful. For example, for the rabbits, I designed this:

This was designed by hand (and based on a hand-written version by my friend Barry Garcia!), but I wanted it to look a little rougher, so I used the distort feature, which you can modify via two metrics: wavelength and force:

That produced this:

And that's what's used here:

Then for actually putting flags together, Keynote is wonderful. The beaver flag here:

Is actually just stacked elements:

And you can actually do quite a bit with element stacking. This whole thing was designed using Keynote:

My wife Jessie did the rabbit drawings, but everything else is little shapes with fills done in Keynote. (Note: I also used Gimp to erase everything outside the yellow circle.) It's not good for everything, but for this I wanted something that kind of evoked old style travel posters, so I think it worked for that.

Sure does. This is the old cover:

And this is the new cover:

There's an entirely new chapter in the new one. I made it the fourth chapter pushing the orthography chapter last. There's a new case study on one of our LangTime Study languages: the rabbit language Engála! I was happy that made it in, although I was bummed initially at having to include it. I wrote up an entire case study on the Munja'kin language from NBC's Emerald City. I contacted my old showrunner David Schulner and asked for his blessing and he was happy to have me include it. Then it was run up the flagpole to NBC and NBC declined! This was the same network that had previously given me permission to use the Defiance languages in the book which are used a lot (and they're used a lot on purpose! NBC gave me the full greenlight to use them! HBO said the GoT languages had to comprise 49% or less of the language material in the book, so I had to use it judiciously). I was so bummed, but it did allow me to use one of the languages that Jessie and I created, and that made me happy.