Making Ya'ssa Accents Actually Usable

[KingOfThePing]

Lore Impact (Small/Medium/Large): Medium

Species: Tajara

Short Description: Adding an accent to Ya'ssa, so it requires less mental gymnastics to use a Ya'ssa accent.

How will this be reflected on-station?: Tajara with an appropiate background can select an accent for an otherwise de-facto dead language.

Does this addition do anything not achieved by what already exists?: Yes

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:

An excerpt from the wiki ( Wiki Languages Page )

Quote

Siik'maas was the widely spoken language of Njarir, though amongst themselves they preferred to use the Ya'ssa dialect. Presumed to be the traditional tongue of the nobility, it uses a more refined alphabet and speech pattern believed to have evolved from a less-used ancient dialect. Hadii members have been recorded to still use Ya'ssa, though ultimately with the widespread annihilation of noble families, this language has fallen into disuse until its revival by the New Kingdom of Adhomai.

 

We can deduct from this excerpt, that modern day (New Kingdom) Tajara have a reason to speak Ya'ssa. Especially the quasi re-instated nobility from the NKA would have an interest in reviving (quote from the excerpt) language, to be more commonly used by the nobility, if it was only to differentiate themselves from the common folk. According to the wiki this revival happened, yet the only Ya'ssa accent represented and possible to select is the following:

Quote

Old Ya’ssa: the tongue of the old Tajaran nobility, spoken by those who were born before the first revolution. It differs from the modern Ya’ssa by having a far more complex set of rules, long-drawn-out sentences, and compound words. Old Ya’ssa is a dying tongue; as the version taught by the New Kingdom of Adhomai has mostly replaced it in the post-revolution noble generation.

 

Playing a normal Tajara, selecting this accent requires insane mental gymanastics, unbelievable backstories, insane justification or a combination of that. There exists a single character that has a believable justification to use this accent. This makes it a de-facto dead accent, if it cannot resonably be used by a character. Thus I propose to introduce a logical, lore-friendly and sensible way to be able to have Ya'ssa accents.

In my mind there are two possibilities. An accent that older nobility Tajara tried to adopt during/after the Second Revolution and an accent that younger noble Tajara (or applicable Tajara) would have learned in school "from the ground up". Meaning: one is an "imitation" accent for older Tajara and one is a "proper" one for younger Tajara to pick from.

 

"Rejuvenized Ya'ssa: After the Second Revolution, the newly seceded New Kingdom of Adhomai did it's best to revitalize it's old language of the nobility. Taught to young and aspiring nobles, this accent tries to replicate the long, drawn-out sentences, from traditional Ya'ssa, with a reduced set of rules to ease learning the language."

 

"New Ya'ssa: Born out of the Second Revolution, nobles all over the New Kingdom tried to bring back and revive the language of Old, with varying success. Less complex sentences and often plagued by intonation problems, depending from which accent was tried to learn away, this accent of Ya'ssa is often spoken by nobles who are in their best years, trying to mask away whatever language or accent they had to adopt before."

Edited March 16, 2023 by KingOfThePing
My grammar suffers after midnight

[Alberyk]

What accent should noble characters who were born and raised before the First Revolution should be pick with this change?

[KingOfThePing]

The existing one - Old Ya'ssa. It's not meant as a replacement for Old Ya'ssa, but an expansion on the accent in general. Maybe should have made that more clear.

I also didn't want to say that Old Ya'ssa is a bad accent, even if I am quite critical about it in this post. It's just not feasible for most, if not almost all characters, and this is my attempt to fix this., I am also not dead-set on the names and/or descriptions on the accents, obviously.

Edited March 17, 2023 by KingOfThePing

[Bear]

I would condense this into just New Ya'ssa. For both the generations born after the first civil war into today.

It would be a fun change I think to see some pompous accent for newer generations, however, two is a bit excessive for the amount of time elapsed.

[KingOfThePing]

That's fine by me. The initial idea was just to differentiate between a quasi "fake" Ya'ssa accent and one learned from the ground up. Maybe instead the Old Ya'ssa accent can be re-written to have less restrictions on who it can take. For example young nobles who got to learn the "proper" Old Ya'ssa during eduction or something similar as well.

Edited March 17, 2023 by KingOfThePing

[EJJ]

I love the idea of an Old and New Ya'saa accent, though I think rolling the two new ones into a single new accent would be for the best. If loredevs were comfortable with it, a performative "definitely fake ya'saa" accent could be an interesting third accent, though I don't know how you'd really distinguish it too much to not just make it New Ya'saa but slightly different.

[Carver]

My concern with making the Old/Pre-FR accent less restricted would be potentially running into the 'HMR Issue' where it's concerningly overused. As it stands, you have to strongly justify a character to have it - and I think rare accents with a strong lore tie-in are interesting! But I do also like the idea of a separate, new/imitation accent for younger nobility - and think that should be the more common/widespread option.

[Desven]

Instead of creating new accents just to eventually only use the newer one, wouldn't it be better to just refluff the existing one? As a received language and pronunciation, there would likely be little difference between “old” and “new” Ya'ssa. Think of how RP and Transatlantic kept stable for a long time.

[Girdio]

So my only confusion is this, and I feel like I'm missing something crucial here. Since nobody mentioned this aspect already, it's possible that I'm just completely lost here but from my understanding, the point of this was to make Ya'ssa more accessible by differentiating between modern and older Ya'ssa.

So, Ya'ssa as language is already spoken in-game, right? Any Tajaran can add it to their list of known languages, through the use of picking the Ya'ssa language at the character creation screen.

My assumption was that the current Ya'ssa that most Taj can pick in their known languages is the modern Ya'ssa, defeating a need for a 'new' Ya'ssa accent. To rephrase, my assumption is that a Tajaran speaking without the Old Ya'ssa accent tag will innately be speaking Ya'ssa in a way that sets them apart as using the "current" Ya'ssa.

From the way the post is phrased, it seems that the issue is that without an accent specifically denoting new Ya'ssa, most characters couldn't speak Ya'ssa wouldn't be used. I may be misunderstanding, if that's not the point. That said, just because a language doesn't have a specific accent tied to it doesn't make the language unusable, based on how other languages and origins are handled. For example, Elyran accents don't have any mention of Tradeband or Freespeak on the Language page, but Elyrans are noted as speaking either-or (based on personal situations). Himeo (and presumably Gadpathur as well) speaks Freespeak as well, but only has their accent listed under Sol Common.

 

Edited March 31, 2023 by Girdio

[KingOfThePing]

You kind of missed the point. This is like saying "Sol Common already has X accents it doesn't need more", yet when lore exists that permits the existance of a new accent a new accent gets added. Languages and accents are kind of only losely connected. A language gives the framework of accents to be added. Factually yes, you can take the ya'ssa accent and no one, except lore aspects prevents you from doing so. Yet this is not what this application is about at all.

[Alberyk]

So, my biggest issue is how new the ya'ssa revival is to warrant its own accent. Even if the free council that existed longer and in "isolation" does not get one, why would something that is less than 20 years old just develop it?

[KingOfThePing]

The council is a whole other thing (it's lore needs expansion in several fields) that is not really the topic of discussion I want to get into here.

I can see the argument that 20 years might not be enough time to develop an accent naturally, since that's a perfectly valid concern. I think an option to explain this is that is was not really naturally developed. Royality got it's place back again at the top and artificially created a way of speaking the old tounge again to re-iterate and put an emphasis on the position of power they regained. That could be an argument on why it had an accelerated timeline, instead of a naturally occuring one, where it maybe takes 50 or maybe 100 years to develop something like a way of talking.

[Alberyk]

We decided to accept the concept of the New Ya'ssa. We will work on it soon.

[Alberyk]

That was added to the language page and the game.