#i didnt know there were xenic ones!!!

[i-love-my-trans-body]

wait this alignment describes me very well

Annulian: A non-binary gender alignment from the galactian alignment system. It is xenic aligned, neutral aligned, and masculine aligned. It can be considered a combination of solarian, stellarian, and xenic aligned.

[uiruu]

i wonder why “wo” isnt allowed in korean. if you see romanized “wo” its actually “weo”, its just that since “wo” isnt allowed, its easier to write it that way. in hangeul its written “u+eo” tho. i mean i guess wo is kinda hard-ish to say, but its not uncommon cross-linguistically, so idk. and you’d think its front mid-to-high diphthong counterpart “ye” wouldnt exist either, but it does. its just the back one “wo” that isnt allowed. it probably just merged with “weo” i suppose. 

but then what about “weu” and “yeu” (pronounced /wɨ/ and /jɨ/)? like i get not being able to write them in hangeul but thats not really relevant to the pronunciation of the language lol. did they merge with /u/ and /i/ respectively? or /o/ and /e/? im not sure why they wouldnt ever happen! its not like theyre terribly hard to say, japanese “yu” is pronounced /jɨ/ or /jɯ/, and theyre really close by and had a lot of linguistic influence on korean (for better or worse. probably worse. imperialism bad). tho, japanese doesnt contrast jɯ with ju, which korean would, so idk. and i know “wi” was originally a diphthong /uj/ which became /y/ which became /wi/ or /ɥi/, but was there a /wi/ before that sound change? probably, and it just would have merged i guess. so then maybe “ui” (/ɯj/ to /ɰi/ unless after a consonant when its just /i/) also represents a former jɯ, i don’t know. but then where is wɯ/wɨ? it makes sense that theres no yi /ji/ or wu /wu/ cause the j/w consonants are just consonant versions of those vowels, so maybe wɨ and jɨ merged into plain u and i? the thing is, like, its really hard to find this stuff out lol, its hard to find specific information on what old Korean would have sounded like. it’s hard especially because it has no known (at least, no widely agreed upon) linguistic relatives, so theres no way to compare with cognate words in other languages. the closest we can come is Sino-Korean words and comparing those with other Sino-Xenic words and middle Chinese and stuff, but that doesnt give the full picture for root words, and there was obviously a time when the Korean language didnt have all those Chinese roots lol, they had to have been borrowed at some point, meaning there was a time before that, and that time would give the best picture of what the inherent underlying phonemes are and why they behave the way they do. 

it could be something like the situation in slavic languages, where the “i” vowel turned into “y” (pronounced ɨ in russian and polish) after consonants that were not palatalized, so jɨ is historically impossible, since *bji would become “bi” and *bi would become “by”, pretty much. its not phonetically impossible though, and if a language had “jɨ” and a word with that was borrowed into polish or russian, maybe they would be able to pronounce that? i dont know enough about those languages to be sure.