#phonology

the definitions are mostly what I used in my playthroughs with a little help from the guides on steam (plus some speculation on grammar)

this is formatted as the dictionary that my oc mercedes would keep if it was them in the game instead of adami adashino. they note that the ghost language has spanish vowel pronunciation rather than japanese because while both languages say vowels the same, they don't speak the latter

here's how I actually write all of the characters:

here's what I named the characters before I landed on sounds for them:

here's my definitions with pronunciation, but organized how the in-game dictionary is (also color coded by parts of speech):

here's the distribution of each character (how many times they appear in the whole dictionary, and where in the words they appear):

I spent way too long trying to figure out what sounds to ascribe to each character to make it actually speakable, and just ended up giving all the consonants optional vowels

the vowels were actually really easy though. I just used the japanese/spanish a/e/i/o/u because homicipher is a japanese game and I'm biased towards spanish pronunciation in general. also I wanted to make this easier for myself

here's that chart as a graph:

compare that to the frequency of letters in english:

so yeah, the character distribution is way too even to avoid having a bunch of words that sound kinda dumb

once I chose which phonemes I wanted to include, I decided which characters represented each of them by comparing their frequencies (as detailed above) with phoneme frequency in both english and japanese (a,e,i,s,t for the more frequent characters, b,f,p,w for the less frequent ones, etc.)

because I wanted the ghost language to sound kind of harsh and violent, I chose to make plosives like k,g,ch more frequent, and soft fricatives like f,h,th less frequent

then began the long process of trial and error where I applied my selections to all the in game words and shuffled things around until I didn't hate it