It's a trivial annoyance, but using IRL languages in RP kind of breaks immersion for me. We are roleplaying humans who are a minimum of twenty plus millennia into the future. None of us have ever seen France, Japan or Scandinavia and yet here we are paraphrasing directly from those languages, all of which by this point in time would be deader than Latin is today. Consider the changes some of the dominant languages have gone through in a mere fraction of that time - over the last 500-750 years for instance.
Yeah, we use modern English too, and that's because we're not really in capsuleers in a remote galaxy where Earth is at best a myth so it's hypocrisy on my part and irony rolled up in one I suppose. Still an annoyance though.
I'm ashamed to say this, but English is my only language. I am from Canada so I should at least learn French, but in any case.
Yes you are spot on when you point out that any of the languages spoken by EVE characters would have scarcely any connection with the languages of long forgotten Terra. The differences between Quebecois and Parisian are quite distinct, with only 400 years separating them.
Americans and Canadians have the same accents that the British had 400 years ago, and of course the dialects between the two are different enough to scarcely be recognizable in some cases. 'Boot and bonnet' instead of 'Hood and trunk', 'Lorry' instead of truck. 'Lift' instead of elevator, and so on. This difference in accents occurs in every CITY in England, and in at least six distinct linguistic regions in English speaking North America. There are also class distinctions too, with Middle class people sounding different than working class people, for example.
Middle English is unrecognizable, and looks more like German (since English is a Germanic language). Old English is also completely unrecognizable. Then of course, there's all of the borrowing (stealing) of words from other languages such as Gaelic, Norse, French, Italian and so on.
Cockneys have their own 'Theive's cant', which is a way for them to speak about illegal activities openly without people knowing what they are talking about. Teenagers do the same thing with slang.
In my former corporation, everyone spoke English even though it was a European (Dutch) corporation. Dutch, Germans, Swedes, Russians, and Japanese all spoke English and wrote English almost faultlessly. It just seems that English is the language of commerce.
I would sometimes see Russian Cyrillic words and imagine that it was written in 'Minmatar'. This changed of course when a fellow Amarrian corpie who spoke with a Russian accent came on the voice comms. Then I pretended to myself that he was from a more remote part of the Amarrian empire.
As far as language evolution goes, I remember seeing a movie about astronauts working at the space station. The fact that they live in a completely artificial and electro-mechanical environment means that they have developed an Engineering jargon comprised mostly of acronyms as names for parts or procedures. The messages are brief and to the point, and use radio protocols. These radio protocols, for military, marine, and CB radio, have only been around for a few decades. Yet they are already a part of our language.
e.g.
Astronauts: 'Number 1 do you copy? Need the EFT on the PB stat.'
Military: "This is Bravo Alpha Delta, do you copy over?" RGR. "Request position over"
CB: "Breaker one nine, breaker one nine! This is steel wheel. I see disco lights on the Eye nineteen, so back down on the back hammer on the back slide. Over." "10-4 I read you. Over and out."
It's kind of ironic, because EVE players have also developed a very similar 'Fleetspeak' capsuleer jargon of their own which is a lot like the one that Astronauts developed (DPS, POCO, POS, and so on).
It's interesting that the word 'okay' was invented by NASA, but has fallen into common use today.
Consider also, that texting over the phone and tweets have significantly changed our written language in as little as perhaps five years. When I was in high school, the only person who would write something like 'Ha-P 2 C U!' would be Prince of Purple rain fame. Today, it has become a new kind of texting language.
So, in the spirit of languages such as the Caldari sounding 'Cityspeak' in Blade Runner ("A mish-mash of Spanish, Japanese, German, what have you"), I would imagine that capsuleers would eventually speak to each other in a technical jargon which would look and sound like three to four lettered words with numbers, almost like an API code.
Why? Well there's a lot more of a need for advanced math and quick scientifically accurate information in a high tech space environment than there would be for jabbering and flowery poetry and prose.
(example "EGYH-223 GOB-12? Ovr." *beep* Rgr! XO 9er 9er RERG VAP GRST. Ovr. *beep*")
Interestingly, Chinese is sort of like this in that it is comprised largely of phonemes (letter pair sounds, AH, OH, BE and so on) that are combined in different intonations distinguished from each other by tone, like musical notes.
There is also a language in India that is almost purely mathematics. If you learn to communicate in this language, you will also learn to be an expert mathematician.
Presumably, as capsuleers we would be spending most of our time in our pods and possibly in fleet as well, so we would probably ALL speak this jargon language regardless of our racial heritage. As we are men and women of action, conversation with non-Capsuleers would be short and blunt. (Dave here. Need help. Stuck in Amamake. Gate camp.")
I remember reading 'The Lovers' by Philip Jose Farmer (a very 'Amarr like' society BTW) about a man who called himself a 'JOAT', or 'Jack of all trades'. In the highly technological information based world of the future, what this meant was that he was a Linguist who specialized in being able to translate forms of jargon. The rocket scientist could now speak to the warp scrambler technician and understand one another.
So I can somewhat imagine a linguist on EVE doing something like this. The languages of EVE are so diverse and numerous, that even translating the jargon of technicians would be a profession in itself. Of course there would be universal translators, but there are so many instances where people don't want to be understood, nuances in meaning, double entendres and so forth that I can see the need for a creative polyglot to help program or correct them.
I think it's interesting what the linguist Noam Chompsky said about language. "There are as many languages on the planet as there are people." I'm not sure if this includes stuff like whale song and bird calls, but chickens have over 30 different types of clucks to communicate things with their brood of chicks.
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Topic: IRL Language Use in EVE (Read 7085 times)