this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2026
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Worldbuilding

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Here's something I haven't done yet surprisingly enough. This is the word for the Commonthroat language in Commonthroat itself.

It's romanized rJhqjHcMr which is pronounced /chuff, late falling strengthening growl; huff, early falling strengthening growl; short low strong whine; long low strong grunt, chuff/

It's a compound word that consists of the roots rJhg meaning throat or language and qjHc, which is the adjective universal or standard. gjHc in turn consists of the adjective qjH whole and the suffix -c meaning related to or associated with (compare English -y or -ish). Etymologically it means pertaining to the whole. -Mr is the 3rd person proximal noun suffix, roughly meaning this or this thing here. The dictionary form of a word is usually the indefinite 3rd person form ending in -g, but Commonthroat is a proper noun, so it can't really be indefinite.

Commonthroat is read right to left. The blue glyphs are vowels and the red diacritics (and the red glyph at the end) are consonants. If a consonant begins a syllable it's written as a diacritic. If it ends a syllable it uses a full letter.

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[โ€“] HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club 2 points 4 days ago (1 children)

How did Commonthroat come to use color as part of the written part of the language and is it possible to read a passage if color is removed?

[โ€“] early_riser@lemmy.world 3 points 4 days ago

Color isn't linguistically meaningful. I colored the consonants differently to make them stand out, and because I like the aesthetic.

Yinrih do a lot of writing using their natural ink, which only comes in dark blue.