[CLOSED] Muncorn's Gutter and Tradeband Rework

[Muncorn]

I made it clear to my recall of my dislike of Gutter, back in my previous; though still current; rework of languages (https://forums.aurorastation.org/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=7514). I have sat on that for a while, as despite my dislike I was both scared to attempt a change, knowing of the backlash I could likely get, and at the same time not even knowing what to change. But, today, in my half asleep state of mind I have found the answer to fixing both Gutter and Tradeband for the better, while making as many people as possible happy...

I hope.

Current Form

Oooooohhh boy. I'm making this just after the rework of Gutter, aint that just dandy. Gutter used to be a language made and used by criminals and slummers, and was an amalgamation of about 7 different languages. It has now been Reformed!; for the better of course; by having it not be made by criminals and instead just by slummers, and it now has 2 names. Look at that effort, good shit boys. For your benefit, I'll put the wiki descriptions of Tradeband and Gutter down here, and for your wellbeing I'll tell you why it's ridiculous while attempting not to rehash what I said in my old rework.

Tradeband

An offshoot of Tau Ceti Basic, which incorporates stronger French, Spanish, Portuguese, Cantonese and Swiss elements, with some Dutch, Italian and Latin influences

A 'flowery, elegant' language, Tradeband is thought to have evolved out of a dialect of Tau Ceti Basic which traders used when bargaining for goods and negotiating prices amongst each other

Freespeak

An offshoot of Sol Common, which incorporates stronger English, Russian, Punjabi and Hindi elements, with some hints of Swahili

A 'rough, informal' language, Gutter is believed to have evolved in Martian slums, quickly spreading throughout the Galaxy

Wowzers, look at those beauties. Only a monolinguist could make those up (For clarification, I'm Scottish. I can say thank you in 3 languages, and 2 of those are English). Let's go through the problems shall we:

1:- Let me simply quote the first problem stated in the old rework, because who wants to do work right guys?

These languages would never work in any feasible way. SC for example; English and Mandarin follow such different forms and structure that combining the two is nigh impossible, and would look positively awful, same goes for TCB. Additionally, why would this ever form? You never see these three groups of people conversing enough for this to be the case, any united governmental body that has those ethnic groups in their control would choose one of the three, and set it as the standard. You can see that done across the world, and is the reason China all speaks Mandarin, or Britain all speaks English rather than Gaelic, Welsh and every other fucking language we have here.

I think that works well enough. Onto the next.

2:- I was going to have the history channel guy here, but the image fucked up. So lemme say here: Aliens As I clarified in the other rework, for a language to definitely be speakable by aliens it needs to be mostly spoken using throat and tongue movements, preferably the back of the tongue. Tip of the tongue and lip movements can't be guaranteed, though are possible. It's iffy, but since we agree they can't speak English, I have a standard, and the reworks meet them to a workable extent, which I'll extrapolate individually for each.

3:- There are several more minor problems, but I'll address those later on.

Gutter

The best way of doing this is giving a simple backstory of the formation of Gutter as per my change, the I'll compare and contrast it to it's original, and explain the differences and advantages. Lets go boys.

 

Gutter is an interesting language, as scholars are quite unsure of where it originated. It is known for sure it resembles Hindi in many senses, though has adapted massively since its origin, but how it came to be or what group it came from is up to debate. The most popular theory is that a small settlement in northern Mars consisting mainly of Indian, Pakistani and Thai immigrants first formed the basis of the language. This settlement was known for growing and spreading largely, and it's citizens and descendants as such are spread across the galaxy now, many in the frontier itself, though records detailing this are sparse. It is known for a fact that the language was first noted en mass in the Olympia slums in 2159-2166, when roughly 19,000 people were recorded speaking it as a primary language (Though not as mother tongue in most cases). The nature of this meant many of these people were travellers are workers, and moved across the settled galaxy quite quickly, and many of the newly formed frontier settlements at the time were full of low-income workers that spoke the language, thus cementing it in its place. Despite this, within Mars and surrounding planets itself little of the population was noted to speak it as a mother tongue, and after the overhaul of the Olympian slums that forced many into different areas or out of the city altogether, the popularity of the language in Mars, Earth and central Sol itself deteriorated, though it remained decently popular on the frontier.

In 2426, it was officially reclassified by the Sol Alliance. It's now official name is New-Hindi, though it has classified Freespeak to be the public name and that to be used in official documents and similar works. Gutter as a name, despite it being the normally given name for it is not recognised, despite a fair bit of backlash to this decision.

 

Apologies for the shoddy work on that, hope the gist of it is there. In summary, it's a simple language, easily spoken and prevalant in the frontier primarily. It still has some speakers in central space, but not as common for sure. Lets get onto differences.

Linguistic Structure: Originally Gutter was an amalgamation of like, 9 different languages. I've spoken with many multi-linguists, both casual and those trained in teaching and the like, and all have agreed that simply does not happen. Duo-root languages can happen, though rarely, but for more than 3 languages to combine is ridiculous. The new structure is simply an evolution of an older language, which happens quite often and especially so in rapidly evolving communities, which is the case of the population of early Mars settlements. This structure simply works better overall, and is actually believable, unlike the original monstrosity.

Origin Story: Every hero needs an origin story. Sadly, Gutter was no hero, it was simply a mistake born out of a want for something fun that got put into the wrong hands. It now has a call to glory, some like, half arsed backstory that's believable and gives the language a root. Admittedly, all I did for this part was expand on what the wiki said, but who cares about details, sshush shush.

Written Form: "Who cares about the written form of the language Mun, you can't even write ingame.", says the person that cannot read my mind and thus know that's next in line for lore/code requests. Old Gutter actually couldn't be written, that was confirmed to me a while ago by... Probably Jackboot, not sure. Freespeak does now have a written form, that being a form of Devenagari (Or whatever, I don't know Hindi shut up) suited to match the new form of the spoken language. However, it's only known by few, due to it's relatively complex and even new nature, and the simple aspect that many people that speak gutter either don't need to write it, or only need to write to other people that don't speak it like employers or similar. But it exists, so there's that.

Alien Speech: Old Gutter made no sense, for the same reason "Old" Tau Ceti Basic made no sense. Why can Aliens speak Tau Ceti Basic and Gutter, which both use mixes of similar languages, but can't physically speak Sol Common, which uses the same mix of similar languages? It made no sense. New Gutter however is mainly vocal sounds due to pure coincidence as it evolved as a language, and totally not designed like that so I could avoid making up some reason for it to be that way.

I think that's it all covered. Feel free to ask for more in- Wait a second, forgot Tradeband...

...

Tradeband

Aww shit nig*a. This one's fun, as I've already been threatened by Nursie over it. Lets jump into it, same shit as last time.

 

Tradeband: Based largely within Italian roots, it was created nearly 300 years ago during the first era of space travel when only small colonies were around and traders were scarce. One of the more prominent shippers was a rich family called the Carpuccios that dealt with interplanetary trade and shipping, mainly between Earth and Mars. Many of their workers were family or friends and thus spoke Italian to each other. As decades went on the worker's families kept the business going, spreading to intersystemary travel as soon as they feasibly could. Their widespread nature and successful business spread the language across far better than would be expected, and the natural slang and mannerisms of the language changed with time as might be expected, and by some point in the 2200's it could be believably called a separate language to Italian. Taking under more simple undertones to it's spoken and written form, it was easy enough to learn and spoken by shippers and merchants across the central hub of the Sol area. In 2307, an official compendium for the language was released and endorsed by the descendants of the Carpuccios (Though their original company had since liquidised), and the name Tradeband was formed for the first time. In 2351, it was classified as an official dialect of Italian, and a decade later named its own language by the native authorities, and has stood strong since as the main stead of Traderspeak and the tongue of merchants across the galaxy.

Wow, look at that shit.

In summary, it's an Italian based language with smooth, pleasant sounding vocals that still functions well enough for Aliens to spe-Woops, too early.

Linguistic Structure: Old Tradeband had the same problems as Gutter, where it made no actual sense. This new version kind of makes sense, but I am open to people posing suggestions and changes for it, as it is somewhat of a stand in for something more reasonable. So like, yeah.

Origin Story: Not much has changed, but fleshing out and adapting to fit the changes to TCB I made, as I'm presuming that is accepted in conjunction with this, if anything.

Written Form: Original Tradeband probably had a written for, and I doubt a single person ever cared if it did. New Tradeband does have written form, looking more like a simplified and edited version of old Italian, with some minor quirks and more modern influences.

Alien Speech: Much like Gutter, it is mostly back of the throat and lower tongue based sounds, but does incorporate several sounds that aliens, primarily Unathi, may find somewhat difficult. It is noted that whilst Tajara, Unathi and Vaucra can speak it, they each have some difficulty doing it effectively.

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That's it... Not as detailed as I might hope, I am tired after all. I am fully open to suggestions, and fully welcome both praise and criticisms of this. Wish you all, good day.

[Mappel6]

I'd like to start by saying that out of basically all the Asian languages, Chinese is the closest to English in syntax and structure. That said, I do agree completely that all the languages should just be reworked.

If any language came out of combining Mandarin and English, it would be a lot more of Mandarin than English, basically taking what's mostly Mandarin and adding in English grammar conventions, perhaps with some English loan-words due to concepts that may exist in English but not in Chinese. I personally cannot think of any other way it would work like this but what would end up would basically either become a cobbled mess or a new descendant of Chinese, and what English parts there would be would become unimportant. Even given around 450 years, I doubt the sheer amount of languages would be able to meld significantly well. It's enough time that eventually some languages could merge together and create new languages, maybe long enough for a couple of 'generations' of language-melding to happen, but this is all 7-9 languages. I legitimately have fun planning out in my head what the hell Sol Common's supposed to sound like. Given the time, 3-4 mostly similar languages or 2 somewhat different languages may be able to meld, but I highly doubt it would go past that.

I personally say take the cop-out method, say either Chinese or English took over Earth and that spread to become the main, common language of the Sol system. Maybe Tau Ceti favored a different language, such as Spanish, German, or the mentioned Chinese/English not taken by Sol, and adopted that as their own common language. Maybe make it to where Gutter evolved from Russian and Thai or something weird like that, and Tradeband can be a mash of Italian and Romanian, two languages (being Romance languages) that I personally think are very polite-sounding, art-y, and beautiful.

Can't think of anything to suggest that wouldn't lead to basically ending up reworking every text-based system in the game, so I'll leave it there. As a note these are my personal opinions and experiences, being interested in but not a professional in linguistics.

[Guest Marlon Phoenix]

Freespeak is a language with roots in hindi - the fact that it's the "gutter" language is a little problematic but we'll just BREEZE over that. It needs a written form because it's a major language of the frontier and they know how to read and write in the frontier.

Italian for Tradeband is neat, I'm humored by the fact you could compare the trading families of early sol expansion to italian city states/mobsters.