How much consideration for mouth anatomy was given when it came to choosing the available phonemes?
TL;DRMouth anatomy was barely considered because no rigged Xi'an vocal tract existed when the sounds were chosen; they just assumed lips, and he hopes to know physiology before designing future languages.
The phonology, yeah, the sounds of the language. Well, we had to make some decisions early on based on some timelines that I won't go into. Based on that, we decided, and Josh Herman has humorously brought this up before, that, oh, they're going to have to have lips. Yeah, because they have M's, "ma". You can't really make a correct "ma" sound without lips. So we are going to continue to factor that into the other languages as they're created moving forward. And in this particular case, a kind of fully formed, fully rigged Xi'an individual, mouth, face, vocal tract, was not available at the time that some of the language got made up. But in the future, I hope with some of the other scenarios, we'll know more about their physiology before I start applying phonology to the languages. So it's somewhat of a chicken and an egg thing. In this case, we decided the chicken would have to have lips.