Human Languages Lore Rework

[DanseMacabre]

Lore Impact (Small/Medium/Large): I would say "small" but "medium" could be applicable due to relative scale.

Species: Human.

Short Description: To quote my document:

Quote

Reflavor Aurora’s languages to make more sense, and to more accurately represent the geopolitics of Aurora’s historical lore.

The long and short of it is that most of our languages are flawed with regards to their lore and implementation, and have their origins in language that were grandfathered in from Bay, a server which no longer even has those languages anymore. This aims to better round and flesh out our languages, without causing too much confusion or an excess in usable languages. I feel strongly this proposal covers all the bases, though I suspect the human lore team may desire a Dominia-specific language, which could be written easily (especially as a dialect of one of the extant languages).

How will this be reflected on-station?: Human lore changes, code changes to languages such as name and syllable list, and the addition of a new language.

Does this addition do anything not achieved by what already exists?: Yes. Besides reworking most human lore languages, it also adds a new language in of itself.

Do you understand that the project may change over time in ways you may not foresee once it is handed over to the Lore Team?: Yes.

Long Description: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zQYoFzhFWtJwq9a4as9wPyU0sPDulMzhi9VHE9SY0_E/edit?usp=sharing

Side note: I am able to do all the relevant code work here, and I already have a syllable list ready for Con-Slavonic:

[ImmortalRedshirt]

Honestly, this is a pretty solid idea. One of my previous gripes with ConSlav/InterSlav(very glad we've dropped the idea of calling it PanSlavic) no longer applies since just about all of the human languages are no longer primarily affixed to the specific nations of 2464, and are given a distributed use throughout the Spur. Just a few thoughts.

• Sticking with the name Freespeak would be nice, given the peoples it is associated with and its use up to this point
• Euro-Romance and Neo-Romance are fairly clunky names, not going to lie. Plus I just don't like hyphens.
• ConSlav being the common language of Fisanduhi and Dominian commoners is a fun touch. I wonder what implications having two social classes that use different languages could hold...
• On that note, is the verb used in that image just a game quirk, and it's actually supposed to be "says,"?

Edited December 10, 2022 by ImmortalRedshirt

[DanseMacabre]

3 minutes ago, ImmortalRedshirt said:

On that note, is the verb used in that image just a game quirk, and it's actually supposed to be "says,"?

Placeholder.

[wowzewow]

Some suggestions for additions :

These are how I'd name the languages.

Tau Ceti Basic (unchanged)

Elyran Standard (unchanged)

Solarian Hanyu (Sol-Yǔ [Translated : Sol-Speak])

Frontier Tongyong / Coalition Common ( [Translated : Tongyong = Common] Col. Com.)

Soviet Interslavic (Interslav)

Occidental Romantique (Romantique/Romantisch)

Other than that, the languages themselves are pretty well thought out. I think they would fit in fine with our current lore, and definitely balance out the rather numerous accents across more languages.

In addition to Coalition Common, I would also like to see added :

Tenggara Asiatic (Asiatic)
Lore

Spoiler

An Austronesian-Asiatic smattering of creole and pidgin languages, a language borne out of intense 21st century economic competition with China. It was ratified and officiated by Commonwealth officials as the lingua franca to spur nationalistic pride and regional unity. As Asiatic was made as populist propaganda rather than an actual conlang; goverment intervention was nonexistent. It remains as one of the few fluid languages, a bastion for minority languages soon to be snuffed out by enroaching globalism. Despite being unable to withstand China's economic might, many hold onto it as an expression of their rich cultural heritage and rugged individuality, carrying the torch of their forebears across the spur.

Tenggaran Aseanic is the first language of planets located throughout the spur with their origins on the regions of Earth located within South China, South Asia and South East Asia. It is also the language of the peoples of New Hai Phong, and to a lesser extent, Konyang and Gadthapur.

Reasoning

Spoiler

Because of this additional language, Sol Hanyu and Col. Com. no longer need to cover South East Asia as a region. My reasoning for this is in the same vein as Interslavic. The differences between Eastern and Western Europe warrant their own language - so too should the differences between East Asia and South East Asia. Not to mention Sol Hanyu and Col. Com. also does double duty of holding up their own factions.

It acts as a useful last catch-all for the uncomfortably vacant void inbetween choosing Sol Hanyu/Col. Com. and Elyran Standard.
Not tied down to any faction in particular (yet) I feel it's useful for Independent characters as well.

 

[SilverSZ]

Personally I think the ideas Danse presents are excellent. Our current languages have been something that bugged me for a long time as I do feel they are in a bad place lorewise and could be greatly expanded upon not just to be up to the standard I would like to see but also be more usable and interesting for characters to use in general.

Whilst of course, the exact specifics of what languages are put in will be up to the Human Team, such as adding a Dominia specific language or the exact names of languages etc. I think that what Danse presents is a very good base to work from for a vast improvement on our current language lore. 

I don't really have anything to add personally, I think the languages proposed are good and cover most bases and the change to focusing on languages born from specific cultures rather than the hodgepodge lore we have now means we can add any that we feel become necessary easily in the future from a lore perspective if a certain area of the world becomes more prominent in lore which I am sure will happen in the future.

[Zelmana]

Anecdotally, a majority of people who speak Gutter/Freespeak are Martian. And is so with our lore- before our the CoC was developed especially. To remove a Gutteral backalley/pirate/rebelious language from Mars is disappointing.

[wowzewow]

10 minutes ago, Zelmana said:

Anecdotally, a majority of people who speak Gutter/Freespeak are Martian. And is so with our lore- before our the CoC was developed especially. To remove a Gutteral backalley/pirate/rebelious language from Mars is disappointing.

Well, considering how large the scope of our lore has grown, having a language tied down to a single planet seems stifling in comparison.

Speaking of which, Freespeak can still be used in the very same way, as a "martian rebel-language" by simply just using it in conjunction with a Martian Accent. So nothing is really lost here, you just need to roleplay it out more.

[DickFreedomJohnson]

Giving this a +1 fully support this change to human languages. This post is made by number 1 linguistic lover TeknoAcid

[Zelmana]

29 minutes ago, wowzewow said:

Well, considering how large the scope of our lore has grown, having a language tied down to a single planet seems stifling in comparison.

Speaking of which, Freespeak can still be used in the very same way, as a "martian rebel-language" by simply just using it in conjunction with a Martian Accent. So nothing is really lost here, you just need to roleplay it out more.

I know it can be used currently- my only concern is danse's long explanation, though I may have read it wrong. We need to be careful not to remove Martian culture.

[limette]

57 minutes ago, Zelmana said:

Anecdotally, a majority of people who speak Gutter/Freespeak are Martian. And is so with our lore- before our the CoC was developed especially. To remove a Gutteral backalley/pirate/rebelious language from Mars is disappointing.

The replacement for Freespeak in this application explicitly applies to both Mars and Coalition. In fact, this would further formalize Gutter among Martians.

12 hours ago, DanseMacabre said:

Frontier Pinyin is the first language of planets with no strong ties to any regions on Earth that are part of the Coalition of Colonies or planets within the Alliance that resisted Solarian authority, such as Mars

[GeneralCamo]

I'm willing to PR this myself to get it implemented, if this has the support of the Human Lore Team. Some feedback though:

• Romantish covers three entire continents if I am understanding it right, plus most of Europe and Africa. I highly recommend at least splitting the English-speaking countries out, as that is not a Romance language and both languages would still cover a significant portion of the Earth and their population.
• We have support for a `partial_understanding` flag. I recommend its usage here considering the lore behind some of these mentions that they are partially intelligible. We could also implement special cultural languages by doing this, like Konyanger Sol having more understanding with Frontier than with baseline Sol.
• We could perhaps add a special Spacer language used by Scarabs and others who have lived in space for generations. This one I am not so sure of.

Edited December 10, 2022 by GeneralCamo

[KingOfThePing]

The only thing I am worried about is having gigantic language bloat like bay(?) has. That's not good with 10 languages and those 10 have 5 sub-types each. Please do not do that. We have accents for that, I guess.

[Agatasa]

I definitely like this proposal, however "pinyin" in the name of a language is very weird. A romanization system isn't a language. I can understand using this to refer to the name of a writing system as distinct from a language, but the document already uses phrases like "dialect of Solarian Pinyin".

I can already see characters saying "speak pinyin", which would be pretty silly. ("Speak phonetic writing", "speak hangul")

[Gem]

i am disappointed that germanic languages aren't represented.

 

2 hours ago, GeneralCamo said:

Romantish covers three entire continents if I am understanding it right, plus most of Europe and Africa. I highly recommend at least splitting the English-speaking countries out, as that is not a Romance language and both languages would still cover a significant portion of the Earth and their population.

good suggestion.

[The7thLain]

Hello and thank you for your submission. We're interested in the concept as a whole, but if we accept this, its final implemented form will have significant revisions from what is currently here in terms of additions, modifications, and exclusions. Some of the ideas presented in the comments are interesting, but I would encourage people to not get too carried away, as while we acknowledge that human lore needs more diversity in terms of their languages, we are not about to take the species from six languages (Sol Common, Freespeak, Tradeband, Elyran Standard, TCB, Sign Language) to gorillions or what have you. Simply put, we will not be able to represent every language group in the world in our setting, nor will factions all have their own unique languages. This may be a good time for us to rework the legacy class-inferred language system we currently have, (Freespeak for the poor, Sol Common/TCB for the middle class, and Tradeband for the wealthy) into something more determined by culture, either from Earth-roots or from the countries that exist in our setting. Really none of us on the team have been content with the implications of class through language that the current human language lore has, and as you may have noticed, we have been trying to move away from it incrementally by making our planet reworks and new additions have their languages determined by culture or the influence of a power, rather than by class. This statement is partially an expression of interest and partially a disclaimer to all in the thread that if we proceed with a retooling of human languages, certain places are definitely going to have their languages changed and you may not like some of those changes. This is *NOT* an acceptance of the application, but a statement of the human lore team's view on the submission as it is. I should also mention that language changes, additions, subtractions, etc, are ultimately not in our hands but those of the head admins. If they do not permit us to change the languages mechanically, we cannot.

Edited December 10, 2022 by TheBurninSherman

[Zelmana]

Good paragraph, thanks lore team.

If you gut gutter from Mars you will be effectively removing a major cornerstone of their rebellious and independent mentality, which has been its primary theme. Now that it is majority destroyed, the only thing Mars really has left is some of its remaining culture. Not many "new" stuff coming out of Mars. To take away the language would kick Mars-characters while they're down.

[Zelmana]

Simply put Mars has a few things going for it-
Poor, Gutter Culture, Reds vs Blues

Rootin Tootin

Pepper

Violet Dawn
Don't neuter a cornerstone of Mars.

[DanseMacabre]

1 hour ago, Zelmana said:

Good paragraph, thanks lore team.

If you gut gutter from Mars you will be effectively removing a major cornerstone of their rebellious and independent mentality, which has been its primary theme. Now that it is majority destroyed, the only thing Mars really has left is some of its remaining culture. Not many "new" stuff coming out of Mars. To take away the language would kick Mars-characters while they're down.

 

1 hour ago, Zelmana said:

Simply put Mars has a few things going for it-
Poor, Gutter Culture, Reds vs Blues

Rootin Tootin

Pepper

Violet Dawn
Don't neuter a cornerstone of Mars.

As Limette said, Mars isn't losing anything. It will be speaking the Coalition language to represent the Martian rejection of Solarian authority, at least with regards to my draft.

Edited December 10, 2022 by DanseMacabre

[wowzewow]

8 hours ago, GeneralCamo said:

I'm willing to PR this myself to get it implemented, if this has the support of the Human Lore Team. Some feedback though:

• Romantish covers three entire continents if I am understanding it right, plus most of Europe and Africa. I highly recommend at least splitting the English-speaking countries out, as that is not a Romance language and both languages would still cover a significant portion of the Earth and their population.
• We have support for a `partial_understanding` flag. I recommend its usage here considering the lore behind some of these mentions that they are partially intelligible. We could also implement special cultural languages by doing this, like Konyanger Sol having more understanding with Frontier than with baseline Sol.
• We could perhaps add a special Spacer language used by Scarabs and others who have lived in space for generations. This one I am not so sure of.

Well, I feel that Tau Ceti Basic is already implied to be a spiritual successor to English - being the lingua franca of the whole setting, and derivation from Esperanto, which has germanic roots.

[Caelphon]

This is being considered, however, it requires to go to the Development / Head of Development for consideration. 

[rrrrrr]

Is this dead/denied? This is way, way, way better than what the setting has at the moment. Leagues better. I want to take my own crack at it if it's denied.

[La Villa Strangiato]

On 30/09/2023 at 12:24, rrrrrr said:

Is this dead/denied? This is way, way, way better than what the setting has at the moment. Leagues better. I want to take my own crack at it if it's denied.

This is not denied, per se, but given the development work required and the editing and wailing and gnashing of teeth that this will require, it's safe to say this is currently in development hell. If you would like to make your own additions to this document or you have thoughts or concerns, please bother me on Discord at lavillastrangiato.