Backstage - OOC Forums
EVE-Online RP Discussion and Resources => Player Driven Content => Topic started by: Ava Starfire on 19 Dec 2013, 08:07
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So, this is more of a "Throw ideas at this thread, and let's see what sticks" than any true attempt as of yet to "create" a language. I was just wondering what others thought/felt, what people think it would sound "like".
I cannot shake the feeling that most of the Matari people, in some form or another (At least Vherokior, Nefantar, Starkmanir, and though more distanced over time, the Sebiestor and Brutor did originate in that same area) are very culturally similar to the various peoples of the Eurasian steppe, or even into the Siberian taiga (sebbies, possibly Krusual). Of course, a language spoken tens of thousands of years from now will of course be nothing like those spoken now, or is very unlikely to be, but it gives us a framework our brains can recognize.
While we all RP, and PF states, that they have varied individual languages, what is the new standard language like? Most speak Amarrian, of course, but MSM is hinted at as being pushed in schools and the like, especially with a guy like Shakor at the helm. So what does it sound like? The Minmatar had a global government and community before the Amarr arrived, so they must almost certainly have had some form of interlingua even then.
I imagine, myself, for MSM to not be terribly unlike certain Turkic languages, which are today spoken across much of eastern and central aisa, and northeastern Siberia; perfect fit, as I assume the various Matari languages are of the same language "family". They tend to be agglutinative languages, with numerous cases for nouns; plenty of chances to use the glottal stop phoneme that has been so widely used in both PF and player fiction! They also tend to employ vowel harmony, which gives them a very distinct sound pattern.
The typical word order is: subject adverb – object – verb; possessor – possessed; noun – adjective. "I quickly to him gave his textbook math"
Keep in mind, I have only a fleeting, passing knowledge of these 2 languages, so any mistakes made, forgive me!
Here is a brief outline of a few words from 2 Turkic languages, Sakha (Siberia) and Uzbek (central and south Asia) to show the similarity between 2 very dispersed languages.
Sakha, question words: tuox "what", kim "who", xaydax "how", xas "how much", xanna "where", and xannık "which".
Uzbek, question words: nima "what", kim "who", quanday "how", quancha "how much", "quani" where, and quaysi "which".
Personal pronouns in Sakha, which distinguish person and number: 1PS min 1PP bihigi; 2PS en 2PP ehigi 3PS human, kini, nonhuman (it) ol, 3PP human kiniler, 3PP nonhuman ollor.
Personal pronouns in Uzbek; 1PS men, 1PP biz, 2PS sez, 2PP siz, 3PS (human and non) u, 3PP (human and non) ullar.
So a sample sentence, using the above as a bit of a baseline: Kini xannik enk dalat knejul? Which book did he give you? (( for this, kini = "he" and xannik "which" were used as they came. ))
The similarities are fun - at least for a dork like me who loves languages and linguistics. Anyway, it "sounds" right for me, as a baseline for a unified Matari language, the glottal stop phoneme is actually used in several Turkic languages.. what do you guys think?
Feedback? Ideas? This isnt an attempt (yet, and likely wont be) to "create" a Minny language, as much as its just a fun mental exercise.
And for fun, a song by Faun in the Uyghur language. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwmkR7H0UNs (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FwmkR7H0UNs) which I could imagine being similar to something one might hear in a Minmatar market, or restaurant, on the radio, etc.
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I could certainly see that sample sentence as a bit of MSM.
Something I do when I want to have something sound like it belongs to a certain area in EVE is look at NPC names or the names of starsystems.
For example, I once decided to give names to the crew of my racing frigate, and I decided that each member would come from the Sanctum constellation as that's where my HQ is located. I made a list of all the syllables found in the system names of that constellation, then pseudo-randomly tied a bunch of them together to form names. It worked quite well.
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My original thoughts for the Sebiestor and Krusual was that their language would be conglomeration of northern European/Scandinavian languages but, what you've put together sounds like something that could be used to tie together the disparate tribes and something that wouldn't be totally foreign.
As I totally stink at languages other than English and have pretty much no talent for linguistics (aside from the rusty snippets of French that I sometimes use as the basis for Ana's Gallentean) I applaud Ava for working on this. I hope that someday this turns into a community project and can get some of the community's MSM fleshed out and as accepted as PF.
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I suck at linguistics too, but I have always thought of the Matari language as a cluster of various different languages/dialects. I've thought that their language consists of various Middle-Eastern/Asian and Scandinavian (excluding Finland) tongues, and having lots of consonants and not that many wovels. The Minmatar Republic is a group of different tribes united under a single government, it would make sense that there were several different languages spoken in the Republic.
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Haven't got any real investment in Minmatar stuff myself, but if it's a standard language you're looking to create that implies that there are multiple tribal or regional languages or dialects too, doesn't it?
If that's the case then one could make an argument for keeping the 'standard' tongue as simple as possible so as many people as possible would adopt it (in addition to their native languages). From that, two suggestions:
1. Remove gender from the language altogether
Instead of him/her/she/he, etc the term becomes neutral - person, people, they. Presumably one of the key functions of a standard language might be to facilitate things like first contact, trade or diplomacy between different clans/tribes - these functions really don't have much need for recognition of gender and if they do they could use terms local to the specific situation.
2. Removal of different words/grammar conventions for plural terms
Simply repeat the word, use a numeric indicator or an adjective to indicate a plural state. If 'mobil' is term for vehicle, cars could be 'mobil mobil' or '<numeral> mobil' or '<term for 'many'> mobil'. (And yes, I copped this from Indonesian/Malaysian for those who noticed)
Again, the idea being to make it as easy as possible for the largest number of people to pick up, understand and use.
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Yeah, I always figured Sebiestor was a combination of various northern European languages, which I sometimes jokingly call "icelandolatvirussian". The rest, though, who knows? many system names are clearly of north European origin, but I assume those come from Sebbie language; who knows what the other 6 tribes use, and I am guessing an interlanguage would likely NOT be based solely on Sebiestor.
It always felt consonant heavy to me, too, and I do like this idea of a very simple grammar system, so it is incredibly rapid to aquire - the loss of a plural marker might be TOO much (say, in spanish, it takes 10 seconds to learn how to pluralize 99% of words) but it could be a consideration.
I like!
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Yeah, I always figured Sebiestor was a combination of various northern European languages, which I sometimes jokingly call "icelandolatvirussian". The rest, though, who knows? many system names are clearly of north European origin, but I assume those come from Sebbie language; who knows what the other 6 tribes use, and I am guessing an interlanguage would likely NOT be based solely on Sebiestor; also, I tried to steer, for MSM, away from typical modern european languages, at least
It always felt consonant heavy to me, too, and I do like this idea of a very simple grammar system, so it is incredibly rapid to aquire - the loss of a plural marker might be TOO much (say, in spanish, it takes 10 seconds to learn how to pluralize 99% of words) but it could be a consideration.
I like!
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Full disclosure: not a linguist or historian.
This is well timed for me as I am expanding on a couple more pieces of short fiction which, at some point, will hopefully become good enough to post. As I focus on the Vherokior angle, I can toss out a couple of ideas as far as they are concerned in areas where I have been unable to find any PF or extant player-created guidelines.
- In terms of Vherokior etymology, I've stuck with the tacit nordic foundation in my own naming conventions, but with a nod to Mongolian phonics only to satisfy my desire to hear a hint of the Gobi in their names. Little bit of Uyghur doesn't feel out of place either.
- As trade is a driver of cross-cultural interaction, and the Vherokior women are noted as being some of the more gifted or prolific traders, I think it likely that the other tribes adopted a fair number of Vherokior loan words over the centuries, particularly those where commerce or professional relationships are concerned. These would of course be molded by the phoneme/morpheme and syllabic structures of the languages of the other tribes, but I imagine these words would stick pretty close to the original Vherokior.
- While there has been some dicussion about whether or not the Vherokior are matrilineal / matriarchal (I write Nisme's family and clan as both, though I do not believe this is a cultural absolute), I am a bit ambivalent on Vherokior being a genderless language. Both Turkik Uyghur and Mongolian are classified as genderless, but have gendered pronouns, while the Nordic tongues are split on gender.
I can throw more out there if these thoughts aren't totally off-base, at least in terms of how Vherokior might influence a common tongue. As always, please let me know of my PF errors or oversights of established player-created conventions.
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Backstage thread on Matari languages (http://backstage.eve-inspiracy.com/index.php?topic=2209.0) from 2011. I suggest (re)reading it all. *wry*
[mod]Fixed link. ~Morwen[/mod]
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I would like to add my two cents and the addition of some African languages into the mix. Specifically how African languages work and how it could be added into Matari RP.
First statement: There are a fucking ton of languages. In some countries there are hundreds of languages all spoken within miles of each other. They are mixed and borrowed from to an extent that you will use a french word followed by an Arabic, several portugese, swahilii french.... then add in all the regional languages the Tribal languages, the sub tribal languages.
You get the picture.
africans speak so many goddamn languages with so many roots that trying to travel across the country, ...you really don't need a translator. You can talk english to one man who will translate it to french then afrikaans to igbo to buy your bread and a tank of gas.
I know this isn't really helpful in trying to form a standardized sort of canon in regards to MSM but I just wanted to insert all the african languages into the mix.
keep in mind many use prefixes and suffixes to alter strongly the meaning of words as well as the majority of sub-saharan african languages being tonal in nature. Then, some in the same family tree with the same grammatical structure and many of the same words ...will not be tonal.
Oh, and did I mention that they are not static? Meaning languages die and are created all the time, even today.
while many languages outside of africa can be described as belonging to a specific ethnic group or regional, in Africa they are like animals in the way they evolve and migrate. In fact, they are not organized by region or ethnicity but by families and sub families and over a hundred of them are widely used as inter-ethnic communication on a daily basis. Over 3000 languages are thought to exist and even the AU has said that all languages are the official language. I don't blame them.
To me MSM if it existed in real life would be further from esperanto and more like tex-mex-valley girl living in africa times 6 and 2/7ths. I imagine a unique word or even sets of words to mean the same thing as well as a structure that would work both forward and backwards just on the basis that the speakers would use both! That words would become common and uncommon as they do now and that the whole language would be fluid, picking up words and structures depending on where it was used.
Most Africans speak many languages and I see most matari doing the same thing, making it easy for them to learn and relearn a fluid language. Perhaps on the northern stepps MSM sounds like sebiestor backwards with brutor and sub brutor words and krusal intonations formally and vherik conjunctions. move south and it would sound very very different with less and less sebiestor words and more Thukker structure in the ports and some nefanir idioms spoken with the intonation and rolling cadence of a small brutor clan that was popularized in a holo.
God this turned into a wall of text fast. anyway, I don't see any native Matari speaker having trouble speaking MSM in their normal area as it is probably the exact same mishmash of languages they were speaking before. Good luck to non-matari trying to understand us when we don't want them too though :)
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Ayallah, while that might describe the overall language in the Republic--and unless something's changed while I've not been looking we don't know for sure--the basic idea of Modern Standard Matari was that it could be a pan-tribal language for a newly-formed Republic where one of the main focuses was the idea of a unified Matari people.
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Yeah I'm with Mata,
It seems to me like your statement is very much accurate in regards to the way languages are spoken in the republic, with all the various tribal and clan dialects mixed with Amarrish and Gallentean overtop of all of it in a crazy mishmash of languages where going ten miles down the road leaves you speaking an entirely different tongue.
However, MSM was supposed to have been introduced in an attempt to fix all of the above. It was supposed to present as one unified language for all of the republic. The issues that arose with its use are the same ones that arose with any constructed language, getting it into use. So MSM started out as way to cure the linguistic soup that was communicating in the republic, but the end result was that it probably just added yet another language to the language stew.
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My overarching point is that the AU is trying to do the same thing. On one continent.
And they arrived at the conclusion that all of them mixed just how they are was the standard. But to me the river is more interesting than the canal.
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Yeah I'm with Mata,
It seems to me like your statement is very much accurate in regards to the way languages are spoken in the republic, with all the various tribal and clan dialects mixed with Amarrish and Gallentean overtop of all of it in a crazy mishmash of languages where going ten miles down the road leaves you speaking an entirely different tongue.
However, MSM was supposed to have been introduced in an attempt to fix all of the above. It was supposed to present as one unified language for all of the republic. The issues that arose with its use are the same ones that arose with any constructed language, getting it into use. So MSM started out as way to cure the linguistic soup that was communicating in the republic, but the end result was that it probably just added yet another language to the language stew.
This really sounded like what the Yellow Emperor did after he united China: He got all the various states to adopt a single language. I might suggest taking a look into it for some ideas on how to encourage adoption of MSM.
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Actually, let's look at this from another angle: what does canon have to say about Matari languages that aren't "the language of the Republic"?
When I first started talking about tribal languages I thought I was the only one doing that. It was part of Mata's clan's reactionary tribalism, and not something I thought was common. It then seemed to take off and become normal.
A long time ago, back when Gottii and I would argue lore like it mattered more than breathing, we had one session where he pointed out the part in the Minmatar timeline which says the Minmatar people had developed a global culture by 20374 AD (https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Minmatar_Timeline), a couple of millennia before the Amarrians arrived. He argued that a global culture pretty much demanded a shared global language. I ended up accepting that. It seems likely to me that in that situation people would either be bilingual in "Matari" and another local language, or the language of global culture would eventually win out. That led me to assume that there had probably been one Matari language that spread during the Minmatar colonisation of three systems.
(What happened after the Rebellion, and where the current language(s) of the Republic came from, is up for discussion. It's one of the things where the range of possibilities seriously changed with the Matari retcon.)
I think I've seen canon references to tribal languages since I started talking about them. I'm not sure of that, though. Can you find me the references?
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I tried endlessly one day to find Matari PF directly referencing language and was unsuccessful. I didn't look in News articles, though. There are several areas of implication, though.
The Minmatar tribes evolved their own traditions over time, but limited communications between them ensured a few basic similarities in their social structure.
This line has always seemed relevant to me. Limited communication + few basic similarities in their social structure fits along with local languages, or at the very least dialects. And even in the case of dialects, IRL there are some dialectical differences that are so sharp that it takes significant effort for a nearby dialect to dialogue with them.
I'll keep on trudging through the PF looking for language references, there doesn't seem to be many.
Edit: Also, from the RP perspective, there would obviously be limitations for creating the language. It would be a fun project, but all you have to do is see how many Caldari players don't use or are annoyed with Napanii to see how far it will go.
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The Northern Sebbie language was more a pet project as a regional language, nothing I expect people to ever use on any sort of in game basis. People have adopted "hvit" to mean "Hello" in Sebiestor, and that's fine. A teeny bit of flavor.
Ive always assumed that Amarrish sort of became the default interlingua of the Matari sphere, and that the current MSM is meant specifically to displace it; I thought Amarrian was still more widely used?
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That seems accurate.
It would take a few generations for Amarrian to be completely displaced and even longer or never for it to never be heard in some manner.
I still persist that the use of regional/ethical languages vastly outweighs the 'common' languages like Amarrian or MSM.