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[Frumple]

For best reading experience, imagine each ' to alternate between being either a kazoo or didgeridoo noise. That gives you both a great deal of amusement and a fairly sizable amount of varying noises it could be replacing.

E: ohey, there's a ten hour didgeridoo track on youtube. That... that's a thing.

[Bohandas]

So they've gotta be individual sounds, amirite? Perhaps some consonant like a glottal stop, to which you didn't want to dedicate an entire letter. Okay. Try to pronounce a glottal stop between [t] and [r]. You can't. Admit it. Oh, they're aliens? Quit your whimpering. Their vocal systems are so different that they can pronounce shit like that and that's the only way in which it affected their consonant inventories?

.........

See here: this is obviously non-native orthography, yes? Because why would one want to mark morphemes in one's own language? Therefore, this demarcation exists to aid non-native readers. Why would they want to have only some morphemes marked, but not all of them? It still makes no goddamn sense.

..........

Perhaps they mark contractions, like in English. But they're in practically every word in your damn language. So no, not that either.

Perhaps they mark the deletion of inpronouncable characters or syllables

Yeah, but that means that in that setting, they can't be used in spoken form by humans or human-analogues. And that's pretty rare.

Well they could still be sort of pronounced by skipping over the inpronouncable parts and pronouncing them as written. Sort of like how I can still sort of pronounce words containing accent marks despite the fact that as an American I have no idea what any of them mean by pronouncing what the word would sound like without the offending marks.

Even so, it implies that the language in question has only one unpronounceable sound. Which sounds incredibly unlikely: what are the odds that a creature can make all the sounds that a human can make...plus just one more? It has an alteration to its voicebox that is so minute and precise that it can only be used to make a single sound that is totally unpronounceable by a human, even in close approximation?
And you can sort of pronounce those words because they're based on Latin orthography and generally the marked graphemes have similar corresponding soundtypes. You know how to interpret ė or į because they're similar to e and i but you can't pronounce й. Apostrophes are kinda like that too, right?

No no no. It replaces any and all inpronouncable thingies.

[Orange Wizard]

Do you guys know what a glottal stop is? It's not unpronounceable, it's just in lieu of a vowel.

[Eric Blank]

I believe they were intending to say that they don't think the apostrophes represent a glottal stop at all in sci-fi novels.

[Descan]

We're not talking about glottal stops. It's a placeholder, in this hypothetical system, for "any and all 'wot' sounds." :V

[Avis-Mergulus]

Well, no. It's not "This thing signifies one sound and one sound only." It's a "... What? Okay, that's another one for the ' pile," scenario.

What would be the point of that. It is assumed that the language in question has both pronounceable and unpronounceable sounds, and the former outnumber the latter (else what would be the point in a Latin orthography anyway). If there are several unpronounceable sounds, it makes sense to have several symbols for them, because while the human readers can't pronounce them, they can distinguish between them, and therefore read (which is the point of a Latin orthography for Chtulhuese).
There is literally no scenario in which the "another one for the pile" approach makes sense. None. If you're going that way, there's no point to having an orthography, since Rule Zero for any orthographic system is "Thy graphemes shall have phonetic meaning that can be derived from their shape or optionally, position, but it shall be a concrete meaning in the end." If an apostrophe in any position could be any of your, say, three unpronounceable sounds, then there's no point to having an apostrophe. Nothing will do just fine, since the apostrophe does nothing for increasing a reader's comprehension anyway if it has no precise meaning.
On the other hand, if we have several different symbols for Cthulhu noises (' for mandible rattle, " for side-spiracle hiss) then a human reader can distinguish between, say "kth"ha'" 'tree', "kth'ha'" 'forest', "kth"ha"" 'water' and "kth"ha"" 'ocean'. With an apostrophe, those would have been indistinguishable, and you'd get meaningless texts. The meaningless texts would be supposedly written by humans (since they're in Latin). Now you must assume your humans are slightly dumb and can't make up a functional transcription system for Cthulhuese.

[Yoink]

Trying to reset my sleep schedule.
I seemingly only slept for an hour, maybe an hour and a half at a time, whilst having weird, vaguely-related, episodic dreams.
And then I slept through both my alarms. And then was too tired to get up and fell asleep again. Ended up crawling out of bed at 10 instead of 7.

...Honestly I think I prefer the nightmares I had the last time I fixed my sleeping pattern.

Mmmm the mashed potatoes were extra creamy today!

I don't know about anyone else but I LOVE creamy potatoes

Oh great, now you've made me hungry.
Yeah I love mashed potatoes. The creamier the better, naturally. Hopefully this post will inspire me to stop being lazy, get out the steamer, and cook some potatoes. More likely I'll just sit here and wish I wasn't too lazy to do so.

[Avis-Mergulus]

Do you guys know what a glottal stop is? It's not unpronounceable, it's just in lieu of a vowel.

It's not in lieu of anything, it's a consonant in it's own right, thank you very much! /pedantry

[AlleeCat]

It feels like half the voice actors in Far Cry 4 recorded their lines completely separate from each other with no pronunciation direction. People pronounce things completely differently in the same conversation.

[Yoink]

A couple of WTFs: had no milk this morning as I was making coffee, it tasted terrible black, so I added macadamia milk.
It's... actually not as bad as I expected. I usually like the taste of rice milk more, but macadamia seems to work better in coffee. Also yesterday I discovered that Pornogrind is actually considered a genre.
It's... pretty bad. The main WTF though, is why did they need a separate genre from goregrind? It's basically its slightly weirder cousin.

[Baffler]

A couple of WTFs: had no milk this morning as I was making coffee, it tasted terrible black, so I added macadamia milk.
It's... actually not as bad as I expected. I usually like the taste of rice milk more, but macadamia seems to work better in coffee. Also yesterday I discovered that Pornogrind is actually considered a genre.
It's... pretty bad. The main WTF though, is why did they need a separate genre from goregrind? It's basically its slightly weirder cousin.

When I saw pornogrind I thought it would be shitty 1970's throwback style synthesizer+percussion, but this is much more hilarious.

[Sinistar]

I've seen Pig Destroyer being classified as porngrind, but they are not mentioned either on pornogrind wiki page or on their own wiki page. Might be thinking something else, given vocals are more like grindcore than "straight from the toilet" pornogrind. Still, get yourself Prowler in the Yard album. Both from technical and lyrical standpoint it's a certified quality, no kidding. Here, have a taste.

[Bohandas]

Apparently Indiana University's rugby coach is named "Sopa Enari". That's a rather unfortunate name. That's like if somebody was named "Fugitiveslaveact Jones" or "Indianremovalact Smith".

Seriously, SOPA was a horrible bill and deserved to die but isn't this comparison a bit like the "nerd blackface" thing people on le Reddit trot out about Big Bang Theory?


It's also just generally a simple combination of syllables that occurs in a lot of languages meaning things like "soup", "sweep", and "it hurts".

Speaking of which... Can someone explain to me why blackface is considered so much worse than any other case in which a person of one race plays a member of a different race, including other cases where the race being portrayed is one that has been historically discriminated against.

Why is it that if I dressed up in blackface people would be extremely offended, but if I dressed up like an asian or a latino then people would be only mildly offended, if at all.

[Neonivek]

Blackface on its own isn't offensive. After all most depictions of it are really terrible depictions.

The reason why it is racist is!!!

Because it is insensitive due to the history around it.

No that actually is it... I had to actually research this.

[SimRobert2001]

Apparently Indiana University's rugby coach is named "Sopa Enari". That's a rather unfortunate name. That's like if somebody was named "Fugitiveslaveact Jones" or "Indianremovalact Smith".

Seriously, SOPA was a horrible bill and deserved to die but isn't this comparison a bit like the "nerd blackface" thing people on le Reddit trot out about Big Bang Theory?


It's also just generally a simple combination of syllables that occurs in a lot of languages meaning things like "soup", "sweep", and "it hurts".

Speaking of which... Can someone explain to me why blackface is considered so much worse than any other case in which a person of one race plays a member of a different race, including other cases where the race being portrayed is one that has been historically discriminated against.

Why is it that if I dressed up in blackface people would be extremely offended, but if I dressed up like an asian or a latino then people would be only mildly offended, if at all.

because there are politically powerful groups who habe profited from African American history. Moreso than anyother group.