While I'm on it anyway...
Caveat: While I no longer feel I have any sort of ownership of this project, the work presented here (and much before it) having long since eclipsed my contributions in pitching the concept, I do have a rather strong fondness for it, which is why I feel compelled to attempt to contribute after all this time.
Early emphasis was put on creating a set of terms and concepts that could be used in passing speech. An example of this is Herko's "Kanisaka" story, which was the Caldari explanation of a Deja Vú. The word literally translated to "Rock in Stream", but is meaningless without the story behind it and the entire context of Caldari culture (and more importantly, an understanding of Caldari spiritualism).
This was all to emphasize the concept of displacement in Caldari culture; that the loss of their homeworld was more severe, more crippling to the Caldari spirit than the mere loss of a home would suggest. The ideas of the spirits (largely influenced by
Shinto) was to reinforce this notion, by introducing the idea of your roots being bound to a physical place by the spiritual idea of your ancestry (again, Shinto).
This would go a long way of explaining the importance of Napanii to expatriate Caldari, as they could begin to see their ancestral language as the only true remaining link to their ancestry. Bereft of their place of birth and that of their ancestors, they had to find a way to bring a piece of that land to them, and language was the immediate choice.
Caldari society is inherently insular. It had a strong focus on maintaining cohesion within tribes, which was effortlessly transformed into a focus on maintaining cohesion within the Corporation (which are, in a way, a mere extension of the Caldari idea of familial tribalism into a capitalistic construct). We had the idea of binding all of this together into a coherent mythology, so me and Herko were tossing around ideas behind The Flow (until he disappeared).
The Flow is the stream of time and mortality in which the spirits play. For a cohesive, tribal structure to properly function, a strong sense of fatalism and reinforcement of the strength of unity is extremely useful in suppressing individual dissension from the group's overall interests.
If you go against your corporation, if you go against your nation and your family, you are alone, both in reality and spirituality. You are shunned by your people, and your soul cast adrift in the Flow, where it is easy prey to the more predatory spirits that inhabit it.
How does this go back to Napanii? Well, the language could very well reflect this, by tying both fundamental and more esoteric concepts into almost incomprehensible phrases and compound nouns; phrases that make little or no sense unless you know the story, the culture and the history of the Caldari people. Phrases that you cannot understand unless you are, in essence, a part of it.
You described Napanii as a reclaimed, constructed language, and I think that is very apt. But it was not built entirely from scratch, but rather built around surviving words and concepts that had been kept alive in colloquial usage (much like Latin, to an extent, is kept alive by mottos and obscure technical phrases).
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Topic: [Language] Napanii (Caldari bloc) (Read 50408 times)