2: WEKSHEK: a chattering, yapping language. Pseudocanine or psittacine, maybe? Bird dawgs, flying foxes, parrots with something original to say...

3: TSS: short names, but clearly not from the previous species! What talks like this? Lizards? Insects? Do not annoy these people. Though they also sound like they have a playful side; an appreciation of the sounds. They will have poetry, and dance, and comedians, though not necessarily standup. Will comedians here perch, or hover, or...?

4: DWAN: monosyllabic words, like Chinese. But do the sounds suggest a type of creature? A bit dour, maybe. Yet these words, like list 3, sound comic. But... unintentionally so, I think. Do these folks lack a sense of humor? Are they all realtors? I also wonder--there's a burbling, honking quality that suggests semiaquatic dinos or big frogs or hippos with fingers. Something wet and muddy.

5: REAMOA: a vowel-rich, slightly Polynesian sound. All those open-mouthed sounds, few gutterals; warm weather, maybe? And they must have leisure time for all those mellifluous syllables... Perhaps an arts-rich culture.

6: OHALLET: hints of the languages of Puget Sound and BC, though the first few don't show it. I dunno... they sound firm, a people with definite rules and views, but sensitive to rhythm. I'd bet all those very precise consonants mean these are descriptive phrases--compounds.

7: NKORE: vaguely African; but what do all these vowels and nasals suggest about this species? They have sinuses and lips... not birds, then.

8: LANTHURA: sounds Indo-European--Latin family with touches of Persian and Slavic?

9: DILOCHA: I have no idea why I associate this group with mountainous country.

10: FROLCONS: Many of the placenames of southern Continent 6 derive from the gestural language of the frolcons, falconlike people evolved from frogs. The first two letters indicate right/left and fore/mid/rear limb; the rest of the name is a brief description of the primary gesture in the full frolcon name.

PRONUNCIATION GUIDE

CONSONANTS Only ambiguous ones are listed here.

• ' = a glottal stop, as in Hawai'i or uh-oh.
• ch = always church, never chris (k), loch (kh), or charade (sh).
• dh = always like this, never like adhere.
• dz = often initial; one sound
• g = always gargle, never George
• gh = a voiced h or hh
• hh = like a gentle Spanish j; harder than English h.
• kh = a strong gutteral, like German or Hebrew ch. For the sound in backhand, k-h is used.
• ks = one sound, often initial
• j = as in jeep. Never a hard h as in Spanish, zh as in French or y as in Balkan languages
• ph = ambiguous, not used. For the sound in hophead, p-h is used; in phase, f is used.
• ps = one sound, often initial
• q = a k sound deeper in the throat, as in Arabic, never the English kw or the Chinese ch-like sound.
• r = varies by language from a vowel colored by a curled tongue to very strong trills
• ssh = a long or emphasized sh. Shsh seemed too cumbersome.
• tch = a long or emphasized ch.
• tl = one sound, often initial
• th = always think, never these (dh) or fathead (t-h).
• ts = one sound, often initial
• x = not used: see ks, kh
• zh = voiced sh sound, the consonant in Asia

VOWELS

Most simple and compound vowels are roughly as in Spanish.

1. ee = always feet, never fiancee. Always an accented syllable.
2. oo = always boot, never foot or cooperate. Always an accented syllable.
3. ü (With luck, your browser shows that as a "u" with an umlaut--two dots over it) = as in French, German, or Chinese. Or just say eeeeee, but then shift your lips into a tube as if saying oooo while not moving your tongue into the ooooo position. It's quite distinctive once you've got it.

ACCENT

Accent is most often on the penultimate syllable: LISpo, aGHUri. But doubled vowels like aa or oo, and diphthongs like ai, ao, eo, iu, mark accented syllables. So do doubled consanants after a vowel, like emm, att, orr. There are no silent letters.

Names without apparent vowels still follow the rules. Just treat continuing sounds like dh, f, gh, h, hh, l, m, n, r, s, sh, th, v, z and zh as vowels, and hard stops like b, d, g, k, p, and t as consonants. Luckily, none of these "vowel-less" languages heavily use glottal stops, or make a (consistent) distinction between k and deeper gutteral stops (as in Arabic q), so we don't face unreadable though quite pronounceable words like tvqgh or 'hhqdh (I hope you're not disappointed). When a vowellike letter is doubled, it often marks an accented syllable, but some are doubled for simple readability, to help you find the pseudovowel, and merely indicate length, not a strong emphasis.

TONES

Some of Pegasia's languages are highly tonal, but tones are not marked (mostly for my own sanity). Length matters too, in some tongues; ii, aa, uu indicate longer vowels, but for elongated e and o (which, if spelled ee and oo, English speakers will probably pronounce like feet and pool) I've instead doubled the following consonant, just as I did to indicate stressed syllables: onn or ell is ambiguous, but will have you saying the right vowel and at least emphasizing the right syllable somehow. You're an alien; they'll probably cut you some slack.

The gazetteer: will have a full index of native placenames, with descriptions--once the contests's over and we have natives to name them.

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