quoting Rhetorica, Kelatetía: Dis, Major Belt 1:

Woah, hold up. Kabyle has two approximants and two trills, not just a weeby tap. It's very out-of-place to have such an undiverse PoA given how many series of plosives and fricatives there are.

And now a rant about transliteration schemes.

As far as I can tell from their Wikipedia recordings, [ʕ] is barely audible, and contrast between [ħ] and [h] is ridiculously hard to hear. If you want those sounds, make them allophones, not distinct phonemes. Even if they get distinct graphemes, there should be some contextual rule about which is used, e.g. [ħ] in word-initial positions but [h] elsewhere. [ʕ] probably doesn't even deserve a grapheme, but could maybe work as the sound of lenition-in-progress as applied to a [ʁ] or [ɣ] consonant (as a counterpart to [x], since otherwise it seems there's plenty of voiced/unvoiced/aspirated-unvoiced contrast in the inventory.)

I think if this collablang is going to be safe from the level of autistic xenophilia that presumably brought about the aforementioned ten-tone lang, then attention really does need to be spent on naturalism. The original writing system of the Berber family, Tifinagh, is quite inexact about phonology—it was originally an Abjad with numerous variants and redundancies. Even today all three common orthographies (Latin, Neo-Tifinagh, and Arabic) have some amount of ambiguity in what a given letter represents. I can understand that, while constructing the language, it might be desirable to have an exact system of phonics1 but no everyday orthography has a perfect 1:1 correlation for more than a few minutes after its creation.

Yeah like I said I missed the line about a phonology like Kabyle being a desideratum before I came up with what I came up with. To be honest, I'm not super into Berber languages myself, don't know a whole lot about them, and don't have any particular desire to create a language that's particularly similar to Berber languages. I think collapsing the [ħ]/[h] distinction into a single phoneme is a good idea, and if people want to make other changes to the phonological inventory, they should suggest them. I also think that talking about how the writing system (if one exists) ought to work is a bit premature, that should wait until the phonology is completely ironed out and we've made a lot more of the language.


Also I reject your claim that a language having /ɾ/ as it's only liquid is "weeby". Lots of languages lack /l/.