They’ve been rebuilding the Tower of Babel, but this time they have a team of linguists on site. Every time God smites the builders and invents a dozen new languages, the linguists have a dozen decently sized translations in about a month and work can start up again.

The linguists have been really into it. They say the new phonemes are fascinating. As for God, I assume that at this point he’s just curious to see how far this goes.

—thestuffedalligator

somethingusefulfromflorida

To keep us on out toes, God gives the next group of builders an extra place of articulation called the flongus between the pharynx and the glottis, creating an entire new column of the IPA chart with sounds between sounds that are literally physiologically impossible for non-flongled people to replicate.

an anatomical diagram of the head and throat with each part annotated with the sounds that they produce. a random semicircle scribble in the throat is labelled "flongus"

somethingusefulfromflorida

photoshopped IPA chart including flongal sounds

Improved symbols for the flongal plosives (“gacks”), flongal trill (“hacks”), flongal fricatives (“groans”), and and the flongal lateral approximant (“moans”)

inthefallofasparrow

Update: The builders have now simply switched to communicating entirely through a universal sign language like they should’ve done to start with. No sounds need be spoken, flongal or otherwise.
The Tower steadily rises. Be seeing you soon, God, you little bitch.

metroid-fusion

update: the builders are all speaking different sign languages now

  • Gutek8134@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Flongus sounds like using epiglottis for articulation, which is a thing in some languages and slamming death metal