gobble_ghoul [he/him]

Doesn’t detract from your point, but I think you’re meaning “anthropocentric” lol.

Is that meant to be /æ/ as in “dad” or /ɑː/ as in “spa”? I find people do not agree on which sound the spelling <ah> indicates.

There are three variants I’m aware of: /eɪ/ as in “day”, /æ/ as in “dad”, and /ɑː/ as in “spa”. I personally say it with /æ/.

The thing that gets me when I try to explain Spanish pronunciation to English speakers is that when I tell them the vowels are always pronounced the same way, it goes in one ear and out the other. You are literally making it harder on yourself by applying English spelling rules to it than if you just memorized 5(!) vowel sounds.

If it ever happens in the future, make sure to hit them with a “that’s not how it’s said in Catalan”.

The Spanish dialect closest to them does the “lisping”, in fairness. Historically inaccurate to call it a lisp, tho, unless you count English TH as a lisp as well.

Pretty much. Phonotactics, important geographic terms that are likely to be reused in multiple place names, a little bit of word order rules - like whether it would be the “Black River” or the “River Black”, and so on. As long as you keep some consistency, you don’t need to get into deeper stuff like conjugation, pronoun systems, how clauses are structured, and so on. George R.R. Martin is actually pretty decent at it, despite not being that interested in languages. Looking at random words from his books, you can usually tell whether something is supposed to be Valyrian or Dothraki just based on the aesthetics and the fact that there are some clearly related words.

David J. Peterson has talked about it a couple of times. Sometimes he’s allowed to coach people on pronunciation and other times he’s not. Sometimes in the edit they will change their mind about what they want the translation of a line to be after filming or splice together different lines, so even though they had him go through the effort of making a conlang and the dialogue, they fuck it all up after the fact by not making sure it matches what the final product says.

Side note, I always thought it was funny that they had the Dothraki repeating “armor” with two tapped /r/ sounds after hearing someone with an accent that doesn’t pronounce /r/ there say it. They apparently had understanding of English writing despite not speaking it.

More people need to learn how to make a naming language so they don’t have to worry about making a full-blown conlang.

Just a little quibble with your point about Tibetan writing - a better comparison would be Modern English written as it was during the Old English period. So like “lord” might be written as “hlafweard”, for example, because it is a direct descendent of that word put through hundreds of years of pronunciation change. English doesn’t come from Latin and “finally” doesn’t come from “ad ultimum”, whereas Tibetan does come from Old Tibetan, the language the script was originally fairly adequately adapted to.

English cows: [myː]

Australian cows: [məːʉ]

American cows: [mʊu]