u/terrortara

This is less a conlang and more a conaccent. Most people will never rid themselves of a nonnative accent in English, so my goal was to create one universal nonnative variety that balances ease of learning with comprehensibility for natives. As such, this is a systematisation of the mistakes nonnatives make when pronouncing English.

I took General American as a base, assuming the cot-caught and strut-comma mergers, so /i ɪ eɪ ε æ ə u ʊ oʊ ɑ/.

I merged the close and near close vowels, monophthonised /eɪ/ and /oʊ/, and shifted /æ/ to /a/, giving /i eː ε a ə u oː ɑ/. And the /u/ is really is [u], not the weird half-fronted version typical of English.

The consonantal alterations were thus:

/ɹ/ -> /ɾ/
/θ/ -> /f/ all positions
/ð/ -> /d/ word initially, /v/ elsewhere.

Phonotactics I didn't touch, because making that easier without screwing up comprehensibility would have required actual thought and effort, and this was just something I did because I was bored.

https://preview.redd.it/t5r9ol3a3vgh1.png?width=1080&format=png&auto=webp&s=bb138076a17d35cca38c05801ede9348e4bc9a4b

I was loving it up to the black and white stuff, those episodes were brutally boring, although the courtroom denouement was pretty cool.

Comparing it with Breaking Bad is difficult, but my thoughts are this: the baseline rhythm of the storytelling is better than BB, and the characters are more grounded and realistic, which I greatly appreciate. But the highs of BB, Box Cutter, Crawl Space, Ozymandias, nothing in BCS even comes close to rivalling them. Also, the one thing that I hated about BCS was a singular piece of terrible writing, Lalo becoming a complete idiot right before his defeat by Gus.

Sorry if this seems like a bit of a ramble, I just finished Saul Gone and wanted to get my thoughts out.

EDIT: Also, I enjoyed Mike, Nacho, and the criminal side of the story much more than the lawyer side of the story.

He has a profitable car wash, plus a big rainy day fund. Anyone who tries to get him to cook blue for them can just be referred to Jesse. Hank and the DEA are starting to investigate his stuff, so stopping now would mean less clues for them overall. Why not stop?

She just has a dark, mysterious, enchanted way about her that suggests a connection with the occult. If you've seen the "Meet Mica" reel, there is a hardcore, sort of haunted vibe to her video self-portrait. Then you have the esoteric visuals (influenced to some extent by their love of Crobenberg and David Lynch), some sex magick moaning thrown into several tracks, not to mention some of the creepy laughter, horror-movie dissonance, and unsettling lyrics on ID, and taken as a whole there is a beautiful but spooky vibe behind their sound and image.

English has many, many irregularities, but off the top of my head, I can't think of a single exception to the '-ing' suffix.