So apparently it's now been officially confirmed that the "Mangkwan" clan briefly mentioned at the end of The Next Shadow comics IS indeed the "ash clan" that will be featured in Fire and Ash (a lot of people speculated this before but it wasn't confirmed until now).
...which is all fine and dandy, except that kw is still not a valid consonant cluster, Karyu Pawl plz explain, the language nerds are crying 😭 Was this perhaps a typo of Mangkuan or Mangkawn? Or a new dialect that allows for more clusters? Or something else?
Right now my theory is that it's gonna be Mangkuan and the Mangkuan vs Mangkwan spelling difference will essentially be the same as Omatikaya vs Omaticaya (the first one being the technically "correct" one per Na'vi phonetics but the second still showing up in some canon material).
Part of the problem here, I think, comes down to what I'm gonna call the Cameron Paradox. James Cameron didn't create the Na'vi language; he created a small list of words, as well as all the character names (from the movies at least, idk about the comics and games), then hired linguist Paul Frommer (Karyu Pawl) to do the rest. Cameron's grammatical/phonetic/etc understanding of the language Frommer built, from what I can tell, seems to be pretty limited; those details are Frommer's realm. So it's very possible that Cameron chose the name Mangkwan because it sounded cool and simply had no idea that it's technically invalid within the sound system Frommer set up.
However...while Cameron himself isn't the one who created the Na'vi language, he does technically own it. It's a commissioned work and therefore Cameron, as the commissioner, has the power to override Frommer if he wishes. If Cameron has his heart set on "Mangkwan", Frommer doesn't really have a choice but to work around that. He might end up doing that by hand-waving it as a special spelling variation of "Mangkuan" (again like the explanation of c vs k in Omatikaya), or he might end up doing it by incorporating some sort of special new dialect rules for the Ash People. Or maybe some other solution that I haven't thought of. We just don't know yet.
...and Karyu Pawl might not actually be legally allowed to address it until after the movie's release date, so we might be waiting for a quite a while to find out ;w;