[REDESIGNED]A Note on Languages

[Muncorn]

[NOTE] This application is out of date, two applications are in it's place at this current time: https://forums.aurorastation.org/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=7514 & https://forums.aurorastation.org/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=8554

Before I get onto the grit of this, I want to say why I'm making this. For a good while, I've noticed something with how people roleplay languages, and it's not too surprising that this has happened, considering how the languages ingame work. People take them for granted. They presume all their characters can speak as many languages as given to a completely fluent level, and the only exceptions I'll ever see are ones of different races that only recently learned the language, and even that is rare. So, I want to change that. I'll attempt to break down each language into origin, structure (Written and Verbal), and usage in it's normal home and it's usage in other places. I've additionally included one in here which I made up for some of my own personal lore, which I might make a post on at a different time, but for the purposes of canonization I'll want that one ignored until further notice. So, lets get to it.

And also, clarification here. Local Systems are were the language is widely spoken, such as Sol Common in Sol, TCB in Tau Ceti, etc.

Language Name:

Language Origin:

Language Structure - Written:

Language Structure - Verbal:

Usage - Local Systems:

Usage - Foreign Systems:

Usage - Ingame:

Ignore this, here for my copypasta for further stuff.

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Language Name: Tau Ceti Basic

Language Origin: Tau Ceti Basic (TCB) was created specifically as an easy to speak, catch-all language for all species. It was designed by language experts after the discovery of Skrell in 2413, in an effort to create an easy modem of communication between the species. It was created with intention for all possible sentient lifeforms to be able to speak it to some degree, and as time went on this proved to work very well. There is the obvious difficulties, such as the Tajaran roll or the Unathi hiss, but it works well enough that no calls for changes have been made. Tau Ceti Basic was made the official language of Tau Ceti in 2421, soon after the discovery of Tajara. Whilst Sol Common is still widely spoken within Tau Ceti, it is no longer an official language.

Language Structure - Written: TCB's written form is simplistic, reminiscent of phonetic writings. It uses a large alphabet with exact phonetic sounds, far different from traditional latin alphabets and vastly different to Sol Common's calligraphic form. Most of the characters are simple yet different, utmost effort put in place to stop any two characters being too alike. It's grammatical structure is reminiscent of an isolating language system, meaning each word functions separately and does not affect the meanings of subsequent or previous words. This was done to avoid confusion amongst the many new learners there would be, and for any species found that were possibly less intelligent than Humans or Skrell were. This proved very useful for the discovery of Unathi, for both the point previously stated and the fact it was fairly similar to the written structure of native Unathi languages.

Language Structure - Verbal: When spoken it is fairly simple to understand, the speech tending to be quite fast in fluent speakers due to the slightly larger amount of separate words compared to other languages. However, the flow of words is very smooth, each sound tending to merge into the next in a seamless manner inkeeping with it's written style. It's sounds consist mainly of throat and lip sounds and only make use of the back of the tongue, a feature much enjoyed by Unathi. This eliminated the use of sounds like; L, C, D, G, and several others. The exception to this is the 'S' sound, which was kept for reasons none of the original linguists will state. More variations of the other sounds were used, and several never featured in Latin and Germanic languages were introduced as well.

Usage - Local Systems: Being the official language in Tau Ceti and surrounding area, it is used in all official newspapers, news, television and the arts, and as such much of the population knows it very well. Sol Common is no longer taught within the public school system, though many private schools teach it, and many children still speak Sol Common in addition to TCB. However, the government tries their best to enforce it's use, some schools and universities even banning the use of Sol Common so as to make it more accommodating for alien species that may be there.

Usage - Foreign Systems: The Sol Alliance makes a fair bit of use off of TCB, though makes a point to not let it be an official language. Many official news outlets and movies are shot in TCB, but any further than that only tends to happen in areas in the outer colonies or the frontier, where enforcement tends to be very lacking. Other than that, TCB is a staple across all other space. Skrellian education systems do not teach compulsory courses to students, though have options for it available from early on in the system.

Usage - In Game: It's normal speech, really. The differences do not make any difference for us reading as we translate it so as to not need to learn a whole new language just to play the game. When reading TCB, make sure to note it's features of writing if that is what you intend to do, and similar case for writing.

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Language Name: Sol Common

Language Origin: Upon the the mass settlement of Mars in the early years of Human exploration of space, massive colonies of different ethnic groups settled into massive cities covering large sprawls of Mars. For a while, there was little structure to these, but soon governmental systems popped up, and realised a large flaw. No two groups of people seemed to speak the same language. There was English, Mandarin, French, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Hebrew, Portuguese, and so many more they tended to lose count. So a group of professional linguists met and devised a language by combining elements of multiple of the largest language bases; English, Mandarin and Portugese, and incorporated these into one language. The result was then enforced upon education systems and media outlets, and was fully integrated by at the least 2200, with the only remnants being spoken in broken dialects on Earth or offshoots using older forms, such as Elysius Gutteral.

Language Structure - Written: Sol Common follows a rather weird setup, in comparison to most other languages. It uses a calligraphic writing structure very similar to Mandarin, but whilst the written form looks very similar to many Mandarin characters, the meanings and pronunciation of nearly all words were changed. Most forms of similar sounds with different characters, the only difference being the pronunciation, were removed in favour of more latin oriented sounds, as seen in the English and Portugese influences. Most words tend to be more reminiscent of the latin languages, with only the occasional influence of old Mandarin words being present, most of it's history contained in the images themselves.

Language Structure - Verbal: When spoken, Sol Common sounds much like you would expect if you mashed English, Portuguese and a bunch of other languages into one thing. It mainly consists of Latin and Germanic roots, with much of the Mandarin influence being in the writing rather than the speech. It follows a generally slow speech flow, and accents between speakers are very, very noticeable, many putting ethnic or cultural twists that have been part of the language for centuries.

Usage - Local Systems: The official language of Sol, it varies massively from place to place, from the entirely new dialect used in Elysius to the more oriental influence in Lowell, to the complete disregard by much of traditional Earth settlements. However, it is in regulated use for governmental systems, schooling, emergency response, healthcare and most modems of media. Every year, a official dictionary is released by the Sol Government, as regulated by the Linguistics division. They additionally keep track of the larger dialects across Sol, and maintain the study of ancient languages such as English, Mandarin and Portugese.

Usage - Foreign Systems: Not spoken much outwith Sol Alliance space, it is only notable for it's prevalence in Tau Ceti, where it is still a commonly used language amongst the long-standing residents. Whilst it is banned from being used in official documents or media, many private schools still teach in it, and smaller newspaper and news networks still use it, especially those geared towards and older audience. Elsewise, it is nearly never spoken by other species for mainly biological reasons, as many of the sounds are near impossible for other species. Skrell are known to have some success, but it is normally only learnt by historians and translators, as it is otherwise useless.

Usage - In Game: Whilst the style of speaking shouldn't change between our current system and this, when writing comes into place (which I hope to God it does) it will be important to note how Common is written in calligraphic, rather than something akin to a Latin alphabet.

Gonna keep updating this over time, feel free to leave feedback and all. Also, as I noted, I am wanting written languages in when this gets passed. If it is not, I'll still push for it, but I won't be as happy.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

We exist on a single planet and we have more languages than there are cultures that speak them. Even within single continents there are diversities in language - europe is a prime example.

However, there is also the lingua franca - the global language. These are languages like latin, french, german, dutch, mandarin, and most recently, English.

If you expand the scope of human expansion into space, and add 400 years, it becomes an accepted aspect of scifi that the earth languages evolve into the Common Tongue.

Ideally, every other solar system would have its own unique dialect or language. But we are restricted in our mechanics, and so we have the number of languages that we have now.

All characters must speak or understand Tau Ceti Basic to work on the station. All races then have their secondary language exclusive to that race - Sol Common is that language for humanity. It would be rather unfair for humans to not have an exclusive language to let them shit talk other species, just how our other species can do around humans. The addition of Tradeband and Gutter are simply icings on the cake.

With my general policy now outlined, I'll respond to the specifics.

I do not like your origin for TCB. Languag doesn't become popular just because it's convenient, otherwise we'd all be speaking Esperanto right now.

The formality of the structure of the language is beyond me, as I'm not a linguist, but I will say that you can't have your cake and eat it too. You use "it's more simple" and "more complex' and "it's different" within the same breath; it cannot be all three, it is either simplified or complicated. The structure itself I guess can be argued night and day with... Killerhurtz? He's into things like this, he might have things to argue.

Also,

 

This was done to avoid confusion amongst the many new learners there would be, and for any species found that were possibly less intelligent than Humans or Skrell were. This proved very useful for the discovery of Unathi[...]

 

Unathi aren't retarded. I'll have you know that sinta'unathi has deep, complex meanings bearing over how you throw a spear, while their mathmatics revolves around a highly advanced form of throwing sticks together.

Anyway,

TCB is the lingua franca of Tau Ceti, and it should have its roots within the system itself and its early colonists. It is much more romantic an idea to have these languages ending up having evolved naturally. Your take on TCB is very clinical, and how it ends up coming across is almost dystopian.

Sol Common also hits the same wrong notes. I repeat my insistence that these language end up where they are through natural evolution - we don't sit around in a room and decide that all humanity must now speak x language. That's something you'd see from the Skrell - in our setting the whole aesthetic of humanity is you can't get more than 20 of them to ever agree on anything. For example, if the UN tomorrow unanimously voted on Farsi being the new global language, would you abandon English? Probably not! I wouldn't.

Once again, the formal structure goes above my head. It tickles my fancy to have a scifi language mix a bunch of modern day languages together - it's interesting to me, but that's probably a personal style choice so I won't dwell on it until my other lore devs argue with me over it.

I can only focus on the aesthetic again,

Languages can act as a glue for the culture that speaks it, and as a wall between cultures that speak seperate languages. Having TCH and Sol Common as seperate, independently-evolved languages provides yet another barrier between native Tau Ceti inhabitants and characters from Sol. It is a subtle difference between the two classes of humans that does a fantastic job of showing, not telling, the fractured, diverse state of the Sol Alliance that even core systems have developed individual lingua franca.

[Killerhurtz]

Tau Ceti Basic:

-If Tau Ceti was designed as a speech bridge between species, how the hell do you expect an entire planet to convert to it within the 8 years between it's creation and it's adoption as the official language? Look at Quebec - even after HUNDREDS OF YEARS they still haven't adopted English. (And I have a bullet with the name of whoever starts stating the retarded geopolitics of the place). I don't know of any place that wasn't originally colonized in a language that decided to completely adopt another language. Even less make it an OFFICIAL language. If anything, TCB sounds like Space Esperanto. Notice how despite being designed for international understanding, it is A) not even actually used for that purpose as far as I can tell, as English is favored and B) has not been adopted as an official language anywhere.

-The writing part makes it sound like it may be vaguely inspired by Japanese scripts - most specifically Katakana, where each letter represents a distinct sound, though going further as to completely separate sounds (which in my opinion is completely useless and even detrimental - because a combination alphabet allows for much more compact alphabets. I sincerely believe that "language mathematics" is easier to learn than more characters - it's easier to remember that p+s=ps sound rather than remember that some letter (for the sake of convenience I actually used a real character) that ψ is ps. And it gets even more complex if you want to add more complex compound sounds. Ignore this snippet if I'm completely wrong).

-Also, while I understand the intent behind it, I personally don't understand how a language can work without context or word linkage (referring to the part where each word doesn't affect the previous or past - which, if I understand, means that any relational thing means nothing - since words do not affect one another, it means that in essence, "blue sky" means very little, as it is only referring to two things. Again, ignore this snippet if I'm completely wrong). It would be easier to use static references - where, just as each letter has a sound, each word has a strict use and definition, and no other word matches that definition/use, and to further avoid mistakes, the language could avoid homophones. So for instance - cup and glass could be combined under a single word defined as "hand-held device used to hold liquid which is small/wieldy enough to drink from". You get the idea.

-I'll be honest, I fail to see any wieldy language where words are different enough that the words/sounds can flow together to almost merge without losing information or mistaking meaning. The throat and mouth can only produce so many sounds (and that's not even invoking the common sound bank available to most, if not all species in TC). Instead, to me, a hallmark of an understandable language would be that the sounds and words sound isolated even in rapid speech - either by a small bout of silence, or an universal sound/word/sentence end sound - verbal punctuation, per se.

-It's sounds are mainly throat and lip sounds? I don't know if Unathi can use lips proper for language. Tajara is also debatable. Vaurca don't even HAVE lips (but I'll set it aside and say that it's a voice synth because vaurca speech can get really complex AFAIK). Throat and tongue sounds would be a better fit - as far as I know, all four main organic species have throats and tongues. So instead of eliminating L, C, D, G, it would eliminate B, F, M, P, V, W sounds in general. And the whole "they kept S in" thing is shady as all hell, especially if it's supposed to be imposed by the state. Why, exactly, would they keep a sound "just because"?

-No seriously, that S thing is bugging the hell out of me

-"More variation of the other sounds were used, and several never featured in Latin and Germanic languages were introduced as well" First, using "variations" of sound sounds exactly counterproductive to the intent of having a simple, easy to learn alphabet - either they fall under the same letter and it gets confusing, or it's even more letters to learn (see? this is part of why I say combinative alphabets are useful - actually I think in my notes somewhere for another completely unrelated thing, I had made an alphabet that literally had 5-letter sounds - each "letter" defining how the throat, back of tongue, mid-tongue, front-tongue and lips were being used. Total it was like, 18 letters in these 5 categories). And to be fair, the only sound that I have not seen to be entirely writable in a latin/germanic alphabet is the arabic/asian guttural kh sound.

-Very minor point, but the guvment enforcing a language for the sake of a "non-native" population sounds like a great way to introduce racial tensions.

-I'm not sure where the "usage in game" part comes in since all languages can easily be used with their prefix. Unless you mean for an eventuality where we fix the language scrambler and allow some random parties to not know TCB?

Sol Common:

-First, in case you haven't noticed - even today, anyone who needs to do trading or deal with people outside their country speaks english, so you'd THINK most of these Mars people would at least have some basis in it if they needed to contact their non-ethnic cities. Otherwise, aside from these traders, there's very little reason for the rest of the population to learn SC - they could just be city-wide ethnic ghettos of sort.

-English and Portuguese? Sure. But I don't entirely know how clean a language incorporating two such different languages as English and Mandarin. I know it's the lore we inherited from Baystation but I strongly disagree with it. Honestly - Sol Common being a modernized successor to Esperanto would make a lot of sense, seeing as there's people speaking it worldwide and some countries like China actually got some schools that teach it.

-Very minor detail, but I feel you're way overstating how much influence the French, Arabic and Hebrew languages are going to have in even a hundred years. If you ask me, in a hundred years (which IIRC is about the timeline at which Mars gets colonized, right?) the most important languages would be English (obvs), Mandarin (obvs), Portuguese (mostly thanks to Brazil's rising economy), Spanish (thanks to the graudually increasing importance of all _other_ mid to south american countries - and TBH? Now that Cuba's embargo is lifted, I can foresee it having quite a bit of influence on the world culturally and technologically, after it catches up), Hindi (because India) and German (because, as far as I can tell, they're not ready to let go of their title of the go-to country for engineering). Though I do agree that if you're going for a melting pot of the three biggest languages on Mars, English+Mandarin+Portuguese makes a lot of sense.

-Another one of these imposed languages. As I said, I can't see this going well - it would work better as a natural happening that was seen as so useful that it disseminated very quickly as to become the de-facto official language of the SA. I have a lot of trouble seeing it be enforced ESPECIALLY since it's basically a Martian thing, and if I'm not mistaken there was a point in human history where Mars and Earth weren't exactly friendly.

-Honestly that whole Elysius Guttural thing was _utterly confusing_ . Don't introduce something you're not going to explain, ESPECIALLY NOT if the name is very similar to another (and well established at that) element of the lore.

-Wierd is usually defined as counter-intuitive and difficult. Gyroscopic precession is wierd - any language designed for the masses shouldn't be "wierd". "Very different" would be a better term.

-Uh. I'm not sure what you mean by "calligraphic" structure. Every culture that's ever written was calligraphic, seeing as the word comes from the Greek root "Kallos" - beauty, beautiful, and "Graphein" - write. Calligraphy is literally the art of writing nicely or beautifully. I'm assuming you meant logogrammic structure? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logogram

-"It uses a calligraphic writing structure very similar to Mandarin, but whilst the written form looks very similar to many Mandarin characters, the meanings and pronunciation of nearly all words were changed" So it's basically either reverse-Engrish, where we write pseudo-Mandarin and say gibberish, or it's... I don't even know. That's just a good way to alienate the Mandarin community who's supposed to learn it. "Is this Mandarin for food, or Sol Common for house?"

-" Most forms of similar sounds with different characters, the only difference being the pronunciation, were removed in favour of more latin oriented sounds, as seen in the English and Portugese influences." That's nice and all, but it sounds like you're trying to make it sound like a polar opposite of TCB. Would be easier to explain the whole language as a logographically written language taking inspiration from Mandarin with a verbal style more similar to it's English and Portuguese influences. Because right now you're basically saying "Written, it's basically Mandarin except it's not. Spoken, it's basically English and Portuguese except it's not".

-"Most words tend to be more reminiscent of the latin languages, with only the occasional influence of old Mandarin words being present, most of it's history contained in the images themselves." This brings up a point. Did you just try shoehorning in Mandarin because that's what the established lore says? Because right now it sounds like "This is basically a mishmash of English and Portuguese, because that makes sense. Except it's written in Mandarin because I have to".

-"When spoken, Sol Common sounds much like you would expect if you mashed English, Portuguese and a bunch of other languages into one thing. It mainly consists of Latin and Germanic roots, with much of the Mandarin influence being in the writing rather than the speech." Me, quoting you basically pointing out the very same point I just made above.

-"It follows a generally slow speech flow" Which seems... odd, seeing as neither English nor Portuguese are particularly slow.

-"and accents between speakers are very, very noticeable" Because what they needed to understand one-another was totally a language where accents sort of matter.

-"many putting ethnic or cultural twists that have been part of the language for centuries." You'd think that sort of thing would be discouraged if it was government-pushed. This sort of thing usually comes up in languages which have evolved naturally. Sort of how, despite how vehement Quebec people are about the French language, "bullshit" and "fuck" are part of the common slang.

-"The official language of Sol, it varies massively from place to place, from the entirely new dialect used in Elysius to the more oriental influence in Lowell, to the complete disregard by much of traditional Earth settlements" That sentence sums up EXACTLY why it should be a naturally-disseminated language instead of the Alliance going "hey guys speak this language pls". Plus it severely undercuts the previously established spread of the language - where basically anyone within the Sol Alliance space spoke it, and within the Frontier it was a 33-33-33 between Tradeband, Gutter and SC.

-"Every year, a official dictionary is released by the Sol Government, as regulated by the Linguistics division" Again, this irks me. It basically feels like the Sol Alliance trying to _regulate language_ and to me, it's somewhere between being as pointless as Vogon bureaucracy and being as insidious as 1981's Newspeak. (To be fair I'd be down for some Newspeak bullshittery happening in the Sol Alliance. That sort of insidiousness would make for juicy lore that would get people caring.)

-"ancient languages such as English, Mandarin and Portugese." Okay let me put this straight. This sentence could assume two things - that "ancient" is defined as old, and by that definition these languages are ancient even today. Or that they're dead languages - and I HIGHLY doubt that Sol Common has had such a deep permeation in the human culture that these languages are dead.

-The in-game part again confuses me a bit.

[Muncorn]

Okay, eh. Lemme try to respond on as many as I can.

Currently, still working on these, trying to perfect stuff. I'll try to do things when I get inspiration, so for now I'll simply respond rather than write more language stuff.

TCB

-First off, the conversion. As stated, it's not a complete conversion from Common to Basic, it's partial. Over the course of 30-40 years it was integrated by the government through schooling and some media outlets. My vision is that they wanted to become the hub of interspecies trade and such, so tried to have all citizens speak TCB to make it more inviting then, say, Mars, where everybody speaks Common and has TCB as possibly a secondary language. Admittedly, I'm not too sure how Tau Ceti's government runs, so eh.

-The written language was a rough description, there's likely be what you mentioned, I'm just too lazy to get into specifics.

-I explained how the word linkage worked for you, I'll give a quick run-down now. My initial description of an Isolating language structure was awful, so I'll remedy this and hopefully clear it up. What I meant was not that each word was not connected, but that the idea of morphemes (The smallest unit of a word) is very different. A word like 'Unbelievable' would be seaprated into three different words with the meanings of Believe, (being able to), and a negation of it, not necessarily in that order. This might be slightly off, as I'm no professional linguist, but it's a better explanation than what I had before.

-I found out about the lips after I made all this, so yes, your idea sounds far better than mine. Additionally, the inclusion of the 'S' was purely since I'm going to get enough flak from this as it is already, if I get rid of the reason Unathi hiss, I'm gonna get lynched. Though, if possible, I would like this change so the hiss does not occur.

-The sounds... I really don't know, to be honest. I'd think the sounds used would correlate with those inkeeping with earlier point on what parts of the mouth are used.

-The last part of ingame usage is mainly for latter languages, rather than TCB. Such as Gutter, which has no written form, or, eh... There'll be more reasons, it's late, can't think.

Sol Common

-So, way I see it, there'll be local dialects and the overall Common language. There may be regional variance such as the slang often used in Elysius and Lowell, to the more Ethnic orientated slang in Terran settlements, but it wouldn't be massive enough to be non-understandable to any other, normally.

-So, mesh of languages has 2 reasons. One, as explained, it meshed the main three languages spoken across Mars at the time, as well as Earth (Though that was not noted at the time of creation) thus making it more appealing and possibly easier for people to learn it. Secondly, I want Jackboot to like this, and he likes this, so...

-So, it's a habit of mine to refer to Oriental styled languages like Mandarin, japanese and korean as Calligraphic, and ones like English, Spanish and so on as Latin languages, due to the way the writing is done. So yes, a logogrammic system is what I meant for that.

-And, yes. This is the problem I had when I had to mesh the languages together in a stupid way. I'll revise things, and in all likelihood just use an English and Portugese mesh and ignore Mandarin. Not sure yet though.

-Yes, the slow speech. Being English myself, I'm used to hearing Portugese and Spanish, and even Mandarin and thinking "Fucking hell they're speaking fast" without realising I speak faster than them quite often. So, that is a mistake on my part. Best way to get abouts that is to not bring up the point at all, so I won't in future.

-Actually, the ethnic twists would happen, since last I recall Mars wasn't the best at keeping a good control on it's populous. And yes, I know this counters the earlier point on the enforcement, I'll work on it.

-Wording was bad on the ancient languages bit, and I do note that the languages would not be dead in the slightest. I'll try to go over all of this in my revision.

I'll try to get some done tomorrow. I'll expect to get it all done by Wednesday unless I get a shitload done tomorrow.