Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Halete]

Wow, it's awesome that people are interfacing with this so much.

I agree completely; part of the reason I thought about using mnemonic haiku tattoos was just to skim the very surface of how deep the conditioning in the gangs would run.

It's no surprise that they modeled themselves close to home; the Megacorporations are exceedingly good at producing loyalists.

To expand on this I'd have to use this page as an Introduction and expand it with an index. Then I could have a stub for each area, such as Triad traditions, etc.

My question is, is this something people would desire? I could hash the Triads out fully, or I could develop other projects. My hope is that if I do expand on the Triads that it will be something that some people will want to pick up and use with their RP.

[Adreena Madeveda]

I can only speak for myself, but : I don't think I'll roleplay another character in the foreseeable future, and it's very unlikely Adreena will interact with the Triads.

But it's a great idea. As you said, people interface with it, which is proof enough
And maybe I'll write something about a "vor v zakonye"-inspired Thukker mafia :-°

[Shintoko Akahoshi]

As a mercenary pilot with... ahem... questionable connections working for the State Militia, I can certainly see Shin having some form of interactions with them.

[Aria Jenneth]

I'm liking pretty much everything but the name at least passably.

About that: "Triads" = RL criminal organization and major, major pop fiction fodder. Yes, it's plausible that the name could crop up again for the same reasons. No, I don't think it matters: the connection is obvious to anyone who's aware of the RL ones and comes with an automatic helping of cognitive dissonance.

You're better off making up your own name than coming up with justifications for mimicking Earth. If you must use RL names for things (which I sometimes end up doing because I'm terrible at coming up with plausible words from fictional languages), I'd suggest using Google Translate. I've been using Mandarin Chinese for bits of Achuran; Caldanese naming conventions seem to owe a lot to Japanese, along with ... Finnish, was it?

Take desired meaning. Pump through translator. Poof-- significant, exotic-sounding name. Just don't be surprised if any native speakers of your chosen language start getting odd expressions when they read it.

(For a properly surreal experience, try reading what is written on a random anime magical circle. English is the arcane language of choice for anime these days, it seems. Same issue.)

[Shintoko Akahoshi]

+1 to everything Aria said.

[Halete]

M'kay. I'll reroll the name since it seems like a desired thing. Any suggestions? If not I'll throw some things together tomorrow and make a shortlist then prod people about that.

[Aria Jenneth]

I'd suggest brainstorming a series of two-word names on the general theme of "thieves with honor" and punching them through the Finnish and Japanese translators.

Pick the one you like best.

Bam.

[Halete]

The clearly obvious solution. I know I was asking for it when I put in the name in the first place to be honest and wholeheartedly looked at it like a placeholder as I put off having to create a name. They're always the things I toil over the most.

It's difficult to get Fin/Jap amalgams that have a nice meaning whilst flowing off of the tongue.

Ho-hum~.

[Mithfindel]

In Finnish, we do not have "indigenous" organized crime. Sure, biker gangs have popped up in the news recently. The term "vanha liitto" (old covenant) doesn't quite apply here: It is the Finnish slang equivalent for "old school", originating from the prison term for "honest" career criminals (i.e. don't touch women or children and similar code).

Digging at older terms, there's "häjy" which probably comes from the Ostrobothnian dialect version of "häijy" (mean). (Ä is pronounced as A in "mad".) Doesn't quite apply, either.

Then there's the term "metsäsissi", "forest guerrilla" - sissi comes from "sisu" (grit, perseverance), meaning everything from army rangers to guerrilla to forest bandits. Our southern cousins the Estonians used to have issues with the so-called "Metsäveljet" (forest brothers) who were originally resistance fighters, with some turning to banditry after the WW2. The last of them surrendered in 1995. There's also the term "Slussenin sissit", "Slussen guerrillas", alcoholic homeless people (many of them Finnish immigrants) living in the Slussen area (including a large cloverleaf interchange and a Tunnelbana/underground station), some of them making their living by selling illegal alcohol and other petty crime. As such, the concept "sissi" might apply in this case. There are clear connections to the concepts of the Disassociated group and the non-entity caste of the State. The "freedom fighter" facet ties in to the "men of honour" concept. And then there's the banditry of the rural sissi and the petty crimes of the urban sissi.

E: Last pre-posting edit was bit in a hurry. In case someone is wondering, Slussen is in Stockholm, Sweden.

[Halete]

Damn. That is one sweet post.

I rattled off a bunch of manufactured words at home last night which are scribbled on a notepad somewhere.

One of the more pleasant sounding amalgams I came up with was 'Somnai' which is nice and simple. Roughly meant to mean 'Triangle'. So we can create a compound word here; Somnaisissi, where Somnai can remain the shorthand.

Edit: Provided this sounds good with people, I'm going to go ahead and change all references to 'Triads' at the weekend if there are no alternative suggestions or objections.

[Mithfindel]

I might drop the beginning part, even, using only the end. "Somnaissi" has (at least the way I'd pronounce it) three syllables, flowing a lot better. If wanting to obfuscate the origin, turn the esses into sh, ending with somnai + shishi -> Somnaishi.

I was additionally thinking of other "organized crime", but nationalist organizations go to the other end of the scale to Templis & CPD (Academic Carelia Society, for example, supported uprisings in and sent military expeditions into soviet part of Carelia). However, the Finnish word for "society (club)" is "seura". Doesn't work together with "somnai" as "sissi" does (at least in my opinion).

Finally, for completeness, I'll note that I forgot to mention probhibition-era smugglers from my list of criminal gangs. The term doesn't work very well here, either: the slang term for "(illegal/questionable goods) dealer" is "trokari", from verb "trokata" (sing. trokaan / trokaat / trokaa, pl. trokaamme, trokaatte, trokaavat).

[Halete]

Your suggestion to drop the last syllable sounds good. 'Somnaissi' or 'Somnaishi' are what I'm leaning on at the moment - probably the latter.

The rest of your post was very informative and interesting.  Whilst they may not work very well here I can very easily see coming back to these posts for future projects.

[ArtOfLight]

Somnaishi is more in line with how most Caldari-esque words would end, as "ishi" as a suffix tends to denote a group or rank whereas "issi" would be a singular conjunction. If you really want to emphasize the unity of the group then change it to Somnaishii, where the two "ii" at the end represent and embodied group like "jaijii" and "haanii".

[Halete]

Excellent. I'm happy with that. I'll roll out the renaming when I'm not multitasking ten tasks (a.k.a when I'm at home). Having an appropriate name gives me a much better sense of tangibility.

[Halete]

Name updated!