Quote from: The Butcher;890677Maybe they went for more guttural sounds better suited for the canine-like larynx and vocal tract of the Dalu and Gauru forms?

Nope. Guttural is a nonsense term for ugly sounding stuff. What you probably mean is uvular and glottal. And the answer is no, sorry. First Tongue sounds like English.


First Tongue is the language of spirits, who lack any internal structure. The writers, among other things, added the "th" and "f" phonemes which didn't exist in Sumerian and ignored that Sumerian is a syllabary where consonant clusters are severely restricted or nonexistent. Those words cannot be written in Sumerian Cuneiform nor can they be pronounced phonetically (with either English or Sumerian phonemes) without adding or subtracting the written vowels and consonants. The pronunciation guide also indicates that the vowels are not correlated with their written value and are pronounced with English phonemes and not Sumerian phonemes (which are identical to Spanish).

As an attempt to create a plausible Sumerian precursor, it is complete garbage that would be laughed out of any conlang community. It's obviously just funny sounding English.

After the Vampire wars is great

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;890961Nope. Guttural is a nonsense term for ugly sounding stuff. What you probably mean is uvular and glottal. And the answer is no, sorry. First Tongue sounds like English.

Ah well, it was worth a try.

Since I'm not a linguist or into conlangs, it doesn't really bother me that much. *shrug*

Quote from: PencilBoy99;891077After the Vampire wars is great

Yeah? Good news. I'd been waiting to buy it because, from what I understood, the version for sale is the original printing... and that they're reworking some of the layout and art... but hopefully not messing with the actual text at all.

Quote from: The Butcher;891111Ah well, it was worth a try.

Since I'm not a linguist or into conlangs, it doesn't really bother me that much. *shrug*

The irony is that it isn't very difficult to make isolated words that sound realistic. All you need to do is define what consonants and vowels occur in the not-conlang and what the syllable structure is limited to. In the case of Sumerian, it shares only some consonants with English, has only four vowels, and syllables are limited to V, CV and VC (and then some consonants may only appear at the beginning or end).

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;890407Something interesting I noticed in W:tF is that many first tongue words violate Sumerian phonology and phonotactics. It is clear the writers had no knowledge of Sumerian or what an actual precursor language would logically look like.

Given that they couldn't get details from the modern world right, color me unsurprised.