Flongal consonants

[Ketsuban]

People on Tumblr had some fun with the concept of the Tower of Babel.

They've been rebuilding the Tower of Babel, but this time they have a team of linguists on site. Every time God smites the builders and invents a dozen new languages, the linguists have a dozen decently sized translations in about a month and work can start up again. The linguists have been really into it. They say the new phonemes are fascinating. As for God, I assume that at this point he's just curious to see how far this goes.

To keep us on our toes, God gives the next group of builders an extra place of articulation called the flongus between the pharynx and the glottis, creating an entire new column of the IPA chart with sounds between sounds that are literally physiologically impossible for non-flongled people to replicate.

anatomical diagram showing the flongus

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IPA chart extended with flongal consonant symbols

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Update: The builders have now simply switched to communicating entirely through a universal sign language like they should've done to start with. No sounds need be spoken, flongal or otherwise. The Tower steadily rises. Be seeing you soon, God, you little bitch.

update: the builders are all speaking different sign languages now

update: some builders have developed new tendons which allow them to produce handshapes that other people cant

…on second thought, should this have gone in Conlangery?

[Imralu]

Update: The builders have now simply switched to communicating entirely through a universal sign language like they should've done to start with. No sounds need be spoken, flongal or otherwise. The Tower steadily rises. Be seeing you soon, God, you little bitch.

How would this accomplish anything? That's like saying "They should have just spoken a universal language to start with." They did ... and then God confounded it. inthefallofasparrow obviously doesn't realise sign languages are languages in spite of the word "language" being right there.

[xxx]

It was not the multiplication of languages ​​that caused the fall of the tower,
it was the dispersion of men after the failure of their enterprise that caused the multiplication of languages...
We must not confine ourselves to a single language in a mad project of reaching heaven through technology,
but rather disperse ourselves in nature, and speak according to our nature...
conlanging is the real nature of mankind...

[Ketsuban]

It was not the multiplication of languages ​​that caused the fall of the tower,
it was the dispersion of men after the failure of their enterprise that caused the multiplication of languages...

This seems hard to defend given that God explicitly states his intentions—"let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech"—and motivation—"the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do".

[xxx]

yes, but to do so, the Lord just scattered them over the face of all the earth...

[Ketsuban]

It's true that the story conflates disunity of language and of political identity, but verse 9 says that "Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth". It seems pretty clear that the "so" in "so the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth" is "in this way", not "and then".

[malloc]

Surely the people without the flongus could simply use synonyms without flongal consonants to get their point across. Admitted that could get tricky if flongals have quite a high functional load or occur frequently in function words and inflections. It's one thing to say "road over water" for "bridge" but considerably harder to find alternatives to "that" or "-ed".