u/DepressionDokkebi

Key:

* Pink highlight for high priority.

* Yellow highlight for medium priority.

* Green highlight for low priority.

WES was given a new color, Teal.

Orange Line merged into Yellow line.

Here is the almost complete chart of the Avatarian Alphabet, based on everything I was able to find data for online. We're currently still missing letters for /ʊ/ as in 'foot' and /ʒ/ as in "Zhao". Those are rare sounds in English, which is why we haven't seen them.

Notes:

• VOWELS:
  • I give two forms for vowels that exhibit mirroring. I don't know if the CLOTH vowel letter has a mirrored form yet.
  • The writers seem to not have the Cot-Caught merger, although most VAs in the US do merge them because they tend to speak West Coast English.
  • Something about how they do rhotic vowels is inconsistent, but I can't quite figure out what the rules are.
  • A lot of vowels I would transcribe as the KIT vowel ended up being transcribed as the schwa vowel.
• CONSONANTS:
  • I could not find a clean pattern for when they create consonant clusters vs. when they split up the blocks using the null consonant/vowel letter. The exception is for the letters <w> <l> <r> and <y>, which have "vowel-like" forms when they come after a consonant.
  • Adding to this, I know at least some consonants besides <w><l><r><y> have mirrored forms, but I haven't charted them here for consistency's sake.
  • Some observed combinations include <kt> and <st>.

Overall feedback (mostly from my comment on another post yesterday):

As a Korean linguist, I'm kinda torn on this. From I saw on other discussions it looks like they mentioned that they were visually inspired by Hangul. On one hand, I'm happy they did that, because Hangul is a source of cultural pride for me and a big reason why I became so interested in linguistics. However, when I did a deep dive into how their writing worked, I was def a little disappointed.

The fundamental reason why Hangul looks different from Chinese characters ("Hanzi") is because it was intentionally designed by King Sejong, instead of evolving from other writing systems. King Sejong is one of the first, if not THE first in the history of writing to create a writing system that intentionally assigned similar letters to similar sounds using a consistent design pattern. Here's an explanation of how Hangul was designed. King Sejong did this specifically because he wanted Hangul to be easy to learn compared to other writing systems, Hanzi or otherwise (Koreans at the time were also familiar with other writing systems (Siddham from Buddhist scriptures in Sanskrit and Pali, Hiragana and Katakana from Japan, Mongolian script, Korean indigenous shorthand systems like Idu, etc.).

Avatarian, although it takes visual inspiration from Hangul, doesn't really engage with this deeper reasoning behind what makes Hangul work. The letters are mostly arbitrary, save for maybe the four approximants <w l r y>. The way they chunk syllables is also odd; if they actually understood Hangul, they would have used null initials, but I don't see any evidence of that here. Their rules for using null characters look like it's entirely vibes based from what I can tell - if two letters look good together, write it together; if not, use the null. No consistency.

I also think if they wanted to incorporate a new writing system into the Avatar universe, they should have been more careful to acknowledge the history of writing in East Asia. While Hanzi was universal in East Asia, it was universal because it was the written language for governance and higher learning. Most other writing systems in East Asia and Southeast Asia were region-specific. Mongolian, Hangul, Hiragana/Katakana, Chu Nom, Baybayin, Kawi, Khmer, Thai, Lao, Burmese, Tibetan, etc. all evolved to match the vernacular in the area. Although the greater East Asian area did have some writing systems that stayed remarkably consistent throughout the ages (such as Tibetan or Siddham), those writing systems had liturgical/academic value that conditioned them to be unchanging. In general, writing is an evolving culture!

If they wanted to use Avatarian, what I would have wanted is for (a more logically designed) Avatarian to be a writing system Sokka invented in the time skip make writing easier as part of his efforts to expand education across the four nations, and Team Avatar is currently trying to roll it out in the background. This is something that was historically reflected during the early 20th century, with re-standardization of Hangul and the Kana, as well as the invention of Zhuyin. To avoid retconning Korra, we could have said most of the people didn't like Avatarian compared the Hanzi, leading to it to dying down during the transition years from Aang to Korra. We can then say it came back during Seven Havens because the apocalypse interrupted the education system that maintained the Hanzi tradition, only letting the easier-to-learn Avatarian to survive. Their current retconning of Hanzi out of the Avatar universe undermines a lot of the cultural value different writing systems had in East Asia, direct disrespect to Hanzi and retconning of the show's past notwithstanding.

My verdict is that among Avatar Studio's many legitimate attempts to foster recognition for East Asian cultures, this was a miss. I know they do a lot of research for this franchise (it is apparent they did at least have someone familiar with linguistics designing Avatarian) and I do appreciate their past positive contributions to the Asian fantasy genre, but I feel this particular attempt ended up falling short of doing East Asian cultures justice, and as a result I think I'm left feeling disappointed.

Tl;dr: 3/5. I know you guys can do better, Avatar Studios.

Hello, random linguist and Avatar fan here. Saw the powers that be dropped a writing system on the franchise, so I decided to quickly piece together what I could.

Working off of what was directly revealed during the panel, I was able to piece together what letters the system had.

This is basically a script for phonetic transcription of Englishː this writing system is designed to record English sounds, not spelling. As such, I used the IPA transcription for English to make my notes. I'm not gonna get into what the IPA is because that's beyond the scope of this post, this is what I was able to piece together.

Observationsː

• Vowels tend to be 3 "units" tall, while consonants tend to be 5 "units" tall. Vowels may have connectors that may ascend or descend depending on whether the consonant comes before or after it; e1 is written on top of the consonant, e2 is written below the consonant. (Note that what they describe as "e" really should be /ɛ/, which I don't get because they were specific enough to use /ɜ/ as opposed to /ə/ or /ʌ/ for "earth", but whatever.)
• Also notably, there are two null charactersː the short one (-1) and the tall one (-2).
• Some combinations of letters can be fused. Notably, we have a digraph for /kt/, /rl/, and /?l/, whatever that diamond letter is.
• As of writing this, we don't have symbols for /eɪ/ (as in FACE) , /ʊ/ (as in FOOT), /oʊ/ (as in GOAT), /aʊ/ (as in MOUTH), maybe /ɒ/ (as in COT or LOT, may be merged with /ɔ/, CAUGHT/THOUGHT vowel ), /p/, /b/, /m/, /z/, /tʃ/ (CH), /ʃ/ (SH), /ʒ/ (in VISION, BEIGE), /h/, and maybe /x/ (as in LOCH, but doubtful if they have one).
• I think we have two unidentified vowel letters and four consonant letters (3 found in isolation, one found only in the digraph with /l/). I'm fairy confident with the letter for /g/, slightly less so for /s/.

Let me know if I missed anything.

This is a redrawing of borders of the Cascadian States, and their subdivision into regions (groupings of counties) that specifically tries to have even populations between the three states for equal representation in a manner that accounts for both natural and human geography.

• Instead of being divided east-west by an arbitrary line, Cascadia is now divided by the Cascade Mountains, which is a real ecological demarcation line, regardless of the Greater Idaho movement which has ruined the discourse on the genuinely different ecological concerns people of Eastern Cascadia have from Western Cascadia. Hopefully, if this map is somehow made reality, I hope Eastern Washington and Western Montana can keep the white nationalists in Eastern Oregon in check.
• The Oregon and Washington border has also been replaced by a line roughly coinciding with the Columbia River vs Puget Sound watershed, which helps the Portland metropolitan area become a more cohesive urban unit instead of being held back by interstate politics (think about the I-5 bridge).
• While the region and subregion designations on this map don't mean anything on their own, they should provide an idea for how many people are in different parts of Cascadia, divided up into comprehensible chunks instead of massively long lists of county populations.
• This map doesn't account for sub-county level changes that should be made. Notably relevant for coastal Lane County OR, southern Pacific County WA, and parts of the Custer County ID.
• State-level finances have NOT been considered. In this map, Idaho will likely be bleeding money due to its massive land area relative to its population, making it difficult to provide essential services. It will need to cooperate with its more economically self-sufficient western neighbors to be able to provide those services.

I don't know if this useful, but here's one attempt at sorting out the "eras" of PreCure, if that makes any sense.

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Classic Pretty Cure: OG series that were foundational to the Pretty Cure Series. They were the ones that established a magical warriors niche off of the magical girls genre. Power of Hope is for adults who grew up on this era of Pretty Cures in particular.

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Early Seasons: These are the seasons that introduced having specific themes each season, and saw the branding switch from Pretty Cure to PreCure. During this time they brought over Glitter Force to the US, but they 4Kids'd it in 2013, so... Yeah.

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Middle Seasons: Not sure why CR has these two seasons (EDIT: + A la Mode), but it does mark a decent transition point, because Mahotsukai/Witchy is the last season that participated in the annual all stars movies.

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Modern Seasons (Unavailable): Just three two seasons so nothing too cohesive about them other than the fact that they're unavailable on CR. Shame, cuz I actually thought Star Twinkle was really good.

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Modern Seasons (Available): These seasons are the seasons that got to be Simulcast on Crunchyroll. By this time the series ended up being pretty polished, so again, nothing much else to write about here.

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If you think there's better ways to organize PreCure eras, plz post, am all ears!