Posting this here since the conlanging comms seem pretty inactive. I FINALLY solved a problem with my Commonthroat lexicon. I was using a verbose pronunciation scheme describing consonants and vowels one by one with whole words. This caused false positives in search results when searching for terms containing the words used in this verbose pronunciation scheme like “weak” or “low”.

In the old system, the vowel b would be given a pronunciation of “short low weak whine”. This made it impossible to find words meaning “short” or “low” etc, since they appeared in so many entries.

When I started working on Outlander, another yinrih language, I came up with a universal phonetic notation that would cover the whole gamut of vulpithecine speech sounds that I call the YPA (Yinrih Phonetic Alphabet). It’s a bit of a misnomer since it’s not really an alphabet, just a more compact way of describing pronunciations.

In YPA, b is rendered “1111”, which won’t conflict with any definitions.

While the Outlander lexicon has used YPA from the outset, I wasn’t sure whether I could update the pronunciations in my Commonthroat lexicon to the new system. But I unexpectedly had a large amount of free time today, so I spent 5 hours straight cobbling together a Python script to replace the old pronunciations with new ones.

So here is the fruit of my labor: https://lonelygalaxy.neocities.org/commonthroat