One thing i’d like feedback about sooner than later: You can hover over a cell in the chart to get that sound’s name (currently just the plosives). (How) should that be capitalized?

The code part is already messy, compared to any other piece of HTML i’ve written. Yeah, it’ll be messy. It’s far from done, but it’s finally done enough to share more publicly than i have before.

If the diacritic spam gets to be too much for stuff in the chart, i’ll just add new Unicode characters as letters. I’m already planning to do that for some of the PoAs missing from official charts.

I hadn’t thought before about the limits of what can be nasalized but it’s not too hard to see that many sounds can be. I’m not the International Phonetic Association so i can do whatever i need or want to with my notation if the IPA isn’t good for something. If i come up with a better way to indicate stuff like this, especially using just Unicode, i’ll at least mention it as an alternative notation.

I already know i’ll have to add my own modifiers for things like articulating in the side of the mouth (move your tongue left or right and make some phones) or with the tongue rolled (a voiced rolled linguo-exo-labial fricative sounds a lot like blowing over the top of a bottle). And more beside as it comes up or people tell me about it.

The vowel chart probably will rely a lot on diacritics because i don’t want to map out every part of it with different, individual letters. Especially for how divisible it is, there’s always something between [i̞] and [i̞̞] and [i̞̞̞].

Huh?

Do you have a timeline of all your stories?

Happy to help. I think i found the first three after asking for fonts here.

I don’t find new fonts often, but i went looking for some nice monospaced ones not long ago and found Toren Mono, Drafting* Mono, and Monaspace (Xenon).

Of the three Monaspace is my favorite because of how it handles very wide or narrow letters like MmWw, liIj. If a wide letter is next to a narrow one, the wide one takes up more space at the expense of the narrow one that would normally have a hard time filling the full width. It makes the font prettier and easier to read, while still being fixed width.

I also recently remembered Pelagiad when i saw it on the cover of Mark Rosenfelder’s Language Construction Kit and wondered how he got the rights to publish a book in the similar Magic Cards font.

Not that i’ve ever heard as a resident of Kansas. But “je ne sais quoi” doesn’t come up in my life often.

It had not occurred to me to see if the game was already logging stuff.

That works, thanks. I thought at first it didn’t but apparently there’s not normally as much stuff printed to the terminal as i expected.

Fascinating! It didn’t occur to me that they’d have to stand up on two legs to hold a number, but i guess that does make sense just like it’s hard to hold an object in my hands when i’m also trying to hold a number.

This post did take me a minute to find, but i figured it would be a good place to ask you questions about the Lonely Galaxy. And i have it bookmarked now.

AdNauseam might be worth a look, though my understanding is that it’s a bit worse than uBO for privacy. I quite like uMatrix. It lets you block CSS, JS, frames, cookies, and other stuff from specific domains on specific domains or globally. I also use Firefox Multi-Account Containers with Temporary Containers to give most tabs their own separate folders for cookies and such.

I started designing the large scale geography of my world not with a map, but with a plastic ball that i drew on with dry erase markers to make a globe. Like a year later i decided that a wide inlet on one continent was created only a few hundred years ago, when a flying island died and crashed into the shore and let seawater flood a bunch of low-elevation land. I touched up the coastline with a few steep islands like you see on the edges of big craters on Earth but otherwise haven’t had to mess with it.

Most consonant-only syllables are forbidden, so i think i will use the non-syllabic consonants as numerals.

Question: Since yinrih have prehensile front and rear paws, why are their numbers base-12₁₀ instead of base-24₁₀? Why don’t they use all of their digits to count like Earth’s Mayans did? Is it something to do with their writing claws, or 24 being a big number for a radix and requiring a lot of numerals, or an oversight, or something else?

Yes, though something that can render in 3D would be nice for visualizing what the data mean. And while that works for 3D, suppose you need something with a fourth axis. You would have to add another level of tabs to keep your tabs in for each new dimension. Not that you’d usually need more than like 5D, but still.

Minecraft is not a serious solution. I could get it to work but it would be terribly uncomfortable to read and edit, almost certainly worse than layered 2D spreadsheets.

Currently i’m making a constructed language and trying to work out what all the possible syllables are given the fairly simple syllable structure. There are tools specifically for this, but there have been other times when a 3D spreadsheet would have been very helpful even if i can’t still remember what problem i had.

Another example, also for constructed languages, is tables of conjugations and declensions in fusional languages. That is, a language where a single prefix or suffix indicates a specific case, person, number, etc. and there are a bunch of these that need to be mapped out.

I’d like to mention:

PolyGlot, a computer program for organizing (con)langs and generating words, with support for things like logographies and a quiz generator. My biggest problem with it is it doesn’t handle Unicode input super well on Linux, so sometimes i have to copy and paste phonetic symbols.

Omniglot, an encyclopedia of natural and constructed writing systems. Good if you need inspiration for your own script.

@early_riser’s work on xenolangs or exolangs. Most conlangs are made with humans in mind, or with Humans-But-With-A-Weird-Forehead (see most Star Trek aliens), which is about the same if what you’re interested in is speech organs. It’s rarer to find someone who considers what a more realistic alien language would sound like.

One piece of potentially helpful information i think you forgot is, what is your controller?

A few things.

A laptop with 2-way HDMI, so i can plug it into a game console and use it as a small TV. Note that i’m aware that HDMI might not work like this.

A wearable soundboard with speakers and batteries hidden in my pockets, and controlled by chorded buttons in my shoes. Use cases include crickets, canned laughter, the Seinfeld theme, and audible air guitar riffs.

A handheld computer that:

• Has physical buttons instead of a touchscreen
• E-ink display for all the benefits of that – Physical light switch for a backlight for the screen (my phone is e-ink but i have the backlight turned off by default, a side effect is i can’t see the screen to turn the backlight on when i need it) – Button to refresh the screen, instead of relying on automatic refreshes (Light Phone II) or updating what’s on screen to get it to refresh (Sony PRS 505) – Solar panel, if the OS is light enough to permit it. Ereaders are totally low-power enough that if one had a small solar panel like a calculator you’d almost never need to charge it. A full handheld computer could probably also benefit from this.

A music player / DAC that:

• Has physical buttons, non-touch screen, & light switch for screen backlight like the above wish.
• Lets you mark some files as audiobooks/podcasts, so it remembers your place in those
• Isn’t just an Android phone that can’t make calls
• Has a reflective or transflective display, so you can use it outdoors without fighting the sun
• Can listen to the radio, if you unfold or plug in an antenna
• Has a headphone jack There’s more to this one because i’m planning to actually make it someday, simply because i don’t expect anyone else to make one that does what i want it to.

Somewhat ergonomic keyboards in laptops. I know split keyboards are hard because the screen has to be about as wide as the keyboard, but i’m sure there’s a way and i intend to someday prove it. I know we can do better than typewriter shaped keyboards with QWERTY by default, even ortholinear boards would be an improvement because layouts can be done in software.

An electric notebook with a touchscreen that instead of using OCR to turn handwriting into text, stores handwriting as vector graphics as a middle ground between OCR and images with huge file sizes. Probably with a slider for how much to simplify lines, and an option to select areas of a page to convert to text via OCR so you can still have diagrams and doodles alongside plain text that’s easy to export and edit.

A device like a generation I pokedex, but for real world animals and plants. This one probably won’t happen because stuff like this is only done as smartphone apps anymore, not as standalone toys.

HUD goggles that are the display of a full portable computer.

• Keyboard input could be done through a split keyboard that hooks onto your belt, with half on each thigh
• Mouse input could be done with a trackpoint / trackball on the keyboard (simple option) or with a bracelet that emits IR light from multiple points so it can be tracked by sensors on the goggles (if you don’t understand what i mean, kind of like a Wiimote and sensor bar), with a ring that goes around your middle finger attached by a wire to the bracelet. When you tug the ring down by bending your wrist or fingers down, that’s a mouse click. (complicated option)
• Two or more hot-swappable batteries, so you can change one out without the device having to lose power
• Transparent LCD over one eye, so the background of the image is just what’s actually in front of you
• Gyroscope somewhere on the head part, so you can turn your head to access different windows like it’s a VR headset. Imagine there’s a bubble around your head with program windows projected onto different parts of it. Large windows look curved around the surface of the bubble. You can drag them around with the mouse, or turn your head to move them relative to your eyes. Probably also makes this good for AR stuff.
• Headphone jack and bluetooth for audio, but not necessarily built in speakers This one might never happen, apparently making any kind of HUD is very hard and expensive and this one is asking for a lot. But it would be so cool. It would finally be a portable computer with a good input system (keyboard) and a display at the same time.

And there’s more stuff i want to exist that doesn’t fit the question. Software (why hasn’t anyone mad a 3+ D spreadsheet program?) and non-technical products.

A lot of dumbphones have pretty small screens. My Light Phone II is about half the size of my old Something-Or-Other brand smartphone.

But if you want a small pocket supercomputer that can make calls, someone else already linked to https://www.unihertz.com/