Zuthal

I will always sing the praises of the voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative ⟨θ̠⟩ for this, by the way. it's a bit further back than a dental, just barely behind the teeth, but it doesn't sound like an s. if anything it sounds midway between th, s, and f. this is the icelandic unvoiced thorn sound.

if you voice it, this sounds almost identical to a z, so it's a perfect fit for yinglets! though I imagine most, when writing comic dialogue, would still be written with zh for this, as it gets across that it sounds different.

PSA: Do not do the "sound out different phonemes" exercise in public, people will be rude and stare at you

Oh we've been reading zh as /ʒ/ this whole time. This makes way more sense phonetically, it's just not what the orthography primed us for.
—🛞

nice post! Just want to put some more info out there as a fellow phonetics nerd.

I think in English usually /t/ and /d/ are alveolar, not dental. At least this is true in the North American Englishes I'm familiar with. In Spanish or French (among other languages) they are dental though, so that's something that is often part of someone's accent when they're a native speaker of one of those languages and learn the other (eg native English speaker learning Spanish).

In varieties of English I'm familiar with, usually /θ/ and /ð/ are called interdentals because you actually pronounce them with your tongue between your teeth (not against the back of them). This is a pretty weird sound cross-linguistically (ie other languages usually don't have interdentals) and even some varieties of English have abandoned them, like some British Englishes (sorry idk the specific region/s) where they use labiodentals instead (maybe also dental/alveolar plosives?), or some New York English where they use /d/ and /t/ (maybe because of Italian influence; Italian has dental plosives and not alveolar ones).

Also the dental phone(me) is represented with /t̪/ if you're doing a more fine-grained transcription.

really good post! never thought about it being written as "zh" for disambiguation but that makes total sense

i will say considering how many homestuck kin i know that even "silly typing quirks" can be a fundamental aspect of identity for a lot of beings (i sure would not deprive the vriska fictives i know of their 8s), and that identity is just as legitimate as yinglet therians. it can be easy to crab bucket legitimacy in therian/otherkin spaces ("we're more real unlike those cringe ones over there" is a really common sentiment) so i always think it's important to say explicitly even though clearly your intentions are good here.

also i love the linguistics posting. i used to not be able to hear the difference between the /θ/ and /ð/, and you explained it very well

interestingly, chutils' yinglet translation mode fails on many of the words that start with "zh" in this post