We're thrilled to share the beautiful poster for "Second Citadel: The Moonlit Hermit," but today is also bittersweet: Mikaela Buckley (@disasterscenario), the incredible talent behind our official art, is moving on from the Penumbra to pursue projects of her own. We're so grateful to MK for all of her superb work; the Penumbra could never have become what it is today without her. We wish her the best; make sure to follow her and keep up with her amazing webcomic (http://braindamagecomic.com )! (We're not currently looking for another artist.)
In the meantime, we’ll see everyone tomorrow for the episode release!
Recently @disasterscenario, the official artist for @thepenumbrapodcast, posted a really incredible gif of Hyperion City from the Juno Steel series. Since she didn’t make a Martian alphabet to go with it, I felt the inescapable call to do one for her based on the letters seen in her art.
Feel free to use this for fanart/fics/official art (*wink wink*) as long as you credit me somewhere.
Consonants and names are (mostly) transparent. Sorry about the vowels; I hadn’t touched photoshop in like 3 years before making this and there was a learning curve.
Explanations below the cut.
Not all letters in the alphabet perfectly line up with an American English letter or phoneme, so I tried my best to spell out the sound they make and include symbols from the International Phonetic Alphabet (which I hopefully used correctly; I don’t have much of a background in linguistics).
I made the decision that Martian is a tonal language that marks tone with dots on its vowels. All vowels must have a tonal marker, and there can be only one tone per syllable. There are five tones:
First tone indicates that the word or syllable is spoken low and level
Second tone is high and level
Third tone starts high and ends low
Fourth tone starts low and ends high
Neutral tone is either spoken flat or continues the tone of any syllable that comes before it in the same word
As you can see, one vowel only exists in the second, third, and neutral tones. This letter changes its sound depending on the tone in which it is spoken; the rest remain the same. Besides that, names tend to be neutral in tone.
You might have noticed that there are three different “rhotic” (r) sounds in this set of phonemes. That’s because R is a bullshit letter and I thought it would be funny to point out that a trilled R, a guttural R, and what we call a rhotic (American English) R actually sound nothing alike by having them all be distinct sounds in the same language. Why did I give Sasha a French R in her last name? Because she’s fancy and it looks cool.
Broadly speaking, the phonemes are built around Juno’s name; a meta joke. Another meta joke is that I only included a Q at all so it would be possible to make the word “Queer.”
Any questions, concerns, or if you just want to hear me rant about the million headcanons I have for how language works in the Junoverse, hit me up here or @92inarow on twitter!
Normally we release posters the day before the episode, but we've kept you waiting a long time, so here's @disasterscenario's latest masterpiece a week early! See you in a week (or five days for $4 Patreon supporters) for "Juno Steel and the Time Gone By"!
I’m just gonna keep reposting this poster every time because I love it and I can.
....and also because you still have one more installment of “Juno Steel and the Promised Land” yet to come! You can listen to part 2 on iTunes, YouTube, or our website, $7 Patreon supporters can read the script here, and $10 Patreon supporters can listen to a very sleep-addled commentary from Joshua Ilon, Kat Buckingham, and Simon Moody here.
And we’ll see you all again in THREE WEEKS for Part 3! And after that it really is the hiatus, y’all. Really. It really is. For real. Seriously.
