Species based language

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Primordial
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Species based language

Post by Primordial »

While I'm waiting for a new tablet pen so I can get back to making half-decent concept art, I was browsing the forums, and was reminded of the incomprehensible Rlaan and Aera system names. I've played around with con-langing before, nothing serious, but it taught me a few things about constructing pronounceable, memorable names and words.

There has been discussion a fair few years back, about just changing it to human pronunciation, but I personally feel that that takes a fair amount of the individuality and feel of a species to just whack a human word mash over the top and have done with it. It's also not that difficult to remember a name if it's pronounceable. Look at LOTR - people remember all kinds of weird, inhumane, names for various places and people, and that's because there was both a pattern and, more importantly, they were pronounceable.

Now I'm not suggesting we go full whack and start making entire con-langs, there's very little point, however, I'm willing to work on some kind of rudimentary language-esque thing to help the progress of the game. As I understand it, naming convention hasn't changed with the 0.5.1 shift, and the names are static anyway - just the system content is not, correct? (As there was a general inability to make Mac OSX work with Vegastrike for the meantime, I have no access to the latest iteration).

So the problems:

1) Names, on both sides, consist of twenty or more characters. Words like this do, rarely exist in real life, but they are made of separate words or roots, and Vegastrike seems like someone just hammered on their keyboard with their face and had at it.

2) Names consist of far too many consonants. The Rlaan in particular seem to have places constructed of honeybee language: Bzzbzzbbzzbzzzzz - sound familiar? You've probably flown through it, or some offshoot... The Aera are less prone to this, but they're still somewhat indecipherable. Personally I learnt to vaguely pronounce some of the system names where the Aera are concerned - the Rlaan? No chance. Again, a language doesn't have to be constructed of consonants for it to be alien, it just needs to sound different, but fitting - psychologically there's little difference.

3) No consistency. Language is made of micro-chunks of words and root words and all that type of thing. Not every word is entirely different - English has so many Latinate root words in it, alongside Greek and... just about every other well known language on the planet Earth.

My suggestions/options:

1) We have a small pool of words or sounds, which are easily identifiable to the attributed race, and we give them meaning, definite or abstract. This method works because the mind then recalls the sounds you give it - think 'Mor' from LOTR - it means 'black', or 'dark' but how many people, reading the books knew, or even gave much thought to that? - it's a sound that is identifiable at a distance, so to speak, and all Tolkien needed to do with it, was stick a fitting word on the end of it and he had a name.
This takes a bit more time, and thought, but gives a little more unity to the space they inhabit, and the factions they represent. Like I said, there aren't enough systems (though there are a tonne of them) to justify going into ridiculous detail over, unless you can find a way to incorporate bits of faction language into other areas of the game, so keep it fairly simple.

2) We have a pool of words, which are easily identifiable with their attributed race and we assign them to systems.


So:

Either way we do this, it's not a monumental task, we need to establish a 'sound' or theme, etc for the given 'languages'.
I don't mind which is done first, Aera or Rlaan, but some kind of agreement on sound thematics would be a good place to start.

Go!
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Re: Species based language

Post by pheonixstorm »

Does the wiki have any information about this?

As for LotR the elven language at least was created and pretty well fleshed out and could probably be used as a complete or nearly complete spoken language as is (though an elvish dictionary was never published to my knowledge)

As far as VS... if you can find enough info in the wiki then by all means have at it and good luck. It would be nice to see something more well defined that what is currently in-game and perhaps we can actually use some of it for more than just planetary and ship names. Some things though (such as the bee reference) may have been more intentional than you think but just badly produced (by smashing the keyboard etc). If you want and have the time clean it all up and make it better :)
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Primordial
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Re: Species based language

Post by Primordial »

pheonixstorm wrote:Does the wiki have any information about this?

As for LotR the elven language at least was created and pretty well fleshed out and could probably be used as a complete or nearly complete spoken language as is (though an elvish dictionary was never published to my knowledge)

As far as VS... if you can find enough info in the wiki then by all means have at it and good luck. It would be nice to see something more well defined that what is currently in-game and perhaps we can actually use some of it for more than just planetary and ship names. Some things though (such as the bee reference) may have been more intentional than you think but just badly produced (by smashing the keyboard etc). If you want and have the time clean it all up and make it better :)

There are online dictionaries of at least two of Tolikens languages.

Figure the bee thing just (badly) references the insect-esque appearance of some of the Rlaan stuff.

I suppose if there's nothing in the wiki I'll take a look at themes, a (pretty) loose guess as sound restriction/weight based on anatomical references (such as there are) and see how it goes from there.
For the moment though, I'm going to get off this damn computer, because I've been on it for far too long, heh heh.
Primordial
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Re: Species based language

Post by Primordial »

I've decided to go for the Rlaan first. They seem to me, to be the easiest of the two to start off with because of the visual clues that their appearance give to a language based: Ie - insect sounding elements (Just, this time we're going to ease up on the ZZZZZZZZ, and try out a few variants of the sound that an insect might possible make, insofar as it is possible to translate rubbing legs, antenna, beating wings, carapaces, clacking mandibles and maw-like-mouths, etc, into a definable sound... oh dear, heh heh). Gonna look through the wiki and see what other elements of culture/anatomy/blah might help expand on this type of thing, because god they surely need it, haha.


Update:


So I've got a good place to start, I can move forward and actually try and make something now, I think, but I need a couple of things:

Rlaan mouths:

From what I can gather they are fairly typical of insect depiction: a roughly ovular maw, with mandibles (four in this case).
This limits a lot of what they can technically produce, sound wise, to hisses and clicks and roars. Which I'm a fan of, but makes the words come out sounding exactly like that - a stringof vowels with some hard consonants and a lot of hissing and buzzing, which is what we're hoping to get away from.
It also pretty much takes away the lips, so that's a few of consonants gone, which isn't bad, it's just limiting. But I found a way around all of these limitations:

Would it be possible, assuming the Rlaan mouth is this ovular maw thing, to make it able to contract and expand in places. This widens the amount of sound control a Rlaan would conceivably have, and so gives more freedom to make decipherable words.

For now, they cannot pronounce B, F, M, P, V, W

I imagine that the ability to contract parts of their tunnel-mouth would allow them to make sounds that, concievably, translate to F, V, and W.

(Yes. I have over thought a lot of this, but what the hell, it didn't take long.)


Finally: a rant and a question:

The main Rlaan religion is "Rlaanbzztkrlbzeentkaan".
That name is 22 characters long with that central jumble of consonants being 9 characters in total and utterly indecipherable.

Uhm, how are you guys for ret-conning that later on if we can offer up some better alternative?


I have a couple of notes and thoughts on the pronunciation of the name 'Rlaan' itself, but I'll get to that one later.
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Re: Species based language

Post by DaveAshton »

Primordial wrote:For now, they cannot pronounce B, F, M, P, V, W
Sounds a bit like Welsh to me :D
Primordial
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Re: Species based language

Post by Primordial »

Spamming updates for now, apologies, but I thought I'd share some quick initial stuff (the thing about this is that it's not particularly intense so it doesn't take as much time as, say, coding or modelling):

Basically I ran the initial process through a word generator, based on some basic rules to get a feel for what Rlaan language would feel like. I thought it would be good to see physically the kind of words that could come out of both variations listed above. Where they are as indecipherable, I suppose it down to bad pattern planning, first iteration, and I think a decent amount of hand tailoring will need to be used at the end, anyway. But it's a decent base sound idea.
I also left out 'C' for both variations since it seemed to me that it would be a constant hard letter and thus fulfilled entirely by K, but feel free to chime in on that if you disagree.
I also made sure each word started and ended with a consonant, but I can't remember if that's the rule of all Rlaan system names or not, but that's easily changed/fixed.

Fifteen 'words' each:

Firstly without the contracting mouth muscles (So without B F M P V W)

ztaauzkr
hlaoudzz
ehseehstaarz
rzzkeeeekirz
hnsuhlozt
zztieehsizkest
stuhlstaah
gzeezt
hsohs
ssuuzkhn
aaktus
hlaaeorlr
ztuurikz
lguukak
doaazz


Then, with the extra letters F V W

yaehnw
stzkouuaady
hzhuiorlhst
suuzz
zhizekzrl
hssual
dkzeeiirwvztusz
xiazarluurzh
hsaasuf
reeoy
anhnl
ziihnezkashst
hlstiv
klieusshs
ksti


Summary

A lot needs to be re-thought, patterns are too long, and I've screwed something up because they aren't always starting with a consonant, although I'm not sure I'm opposed to it.
I don't think I've nailed it very well, I'm not sure that those three consonants make much of a difference, but I'll stick with the divide for now, because as I clear it up, it might become easier to discern between the two.
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Re: Species based language

Post by DaveAshton »

Primordial wrote: I also left out 'C' for both variations since it seemed to me that it would be a constant hard letter and thus fulfilled entirely by K, but feel free to chime in on that if you disagree.
Makes sense to me. Hard Cs are Ks, soft Cs are Ss (the same as English actually, come to think of it... why do we even need a C in our alphabet :?: ).

Random thought, but how about taking all the "i"s out, and replacing with Y?
Primordial
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Re: Species based language

Post by Primordial »

DaveAshton wrote:
Primordial wrote: I also left out 'C' for both variations since it seemed to me that it would be a constant hard letter and thus fulfilled entirely by K, but feel free to chime in on that if you disagree.
Makes sense to me. Hard Cs are Ks, soft Cs are Ss (the same as English actually, come to think of it... why do we even need a C in our alphabet :?: ).

Random thought, but how about taking all the "i"s out, and replacing with Y?
I would, but I don't think it fits very well with the Rlaan feel. It might work pretty well with the Aera - they tend to want to be efficient and streamlined, right?
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Re: Species based language

Post by Primordial »

Working a little bit on refining the pattern generation rules. Still, poorly put together right now as it's a fairly hack/slash edit - mainly because I went through the wiki about ten minutes more and found that I didn't have to start and end everything with a consonant (hooray!). I'll refrain from spamming you with generated updates, though they are looking better.

Minor testing changes: I remove Y from the alphabet, left I, and removed Q - it's just a really ambiguous letter and only really used in tandem with U, in English. I might reintroduce them later.

Tangent time:

One thing, I mentioned earlier, about the pronunciation of the name 'Rlaan'; and it's actually a completely subjective subject, to be honest, but I was thinking about it anyhow, did a bit of forum browsing, found an old topic:

As I understand it there are about five different way that it could be pronounced (with probably a boat load of others I didn't see):
With the most common being the 'R' is used as a strong consonant, pronounced 'ar' and 'laan' being either 'lorn' or 'lahn'.

So we have

Ar-lahn
Ar-lorn

Or the R is weaker and pronounced 'er' while the last syllable remains unchanged

Er-lahn
Er-lorn


I'd, however, suggest that the 'Rl' would be pronounced together into a kinda of half-barking noise from the chest 'Rhl', which sort of makes sense, being as the Rlaan are all chest with very little, seemingly, in the way of lungs and voice box and mouth - it's all one pretty straight line. The Rlaan seem pretty big and they have a lot of lung room, with not an enormous amount of vocal dexterity as I assume they lack a tongue. Even with my idea of contracting/expanding mouth muscles, most of a Rlaans letter formation would still be fairly hiss-roar-click style noises, coming mainly from the chest/throat area and fairly guttural.

If nobody is around you, you might try this yourself: Pronounce the alphabet without using your tongue, or your lips - keeping most of the noise to the back/throat area of the mouth to the middle (and really, nobody should be around - they'll either think you're choking on something or have suddenly lapsed into some kind mental deficiency). You'll see what I mean: things like D and G sounds pretty similar and a lot of things are just varied "HSS-". It's actually kind of amusing (and these guys are supposed to talk indecipherable/untranslatable philosophy to one another!).

Though, I will admit that none of this is very practical, heh heh...

Either way: now try looking at these guys the same way in game XP
pheonixstorm
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Re: Species based language

Post by pheonixstorm »

I would say its all rather practical. The better we can develop any one species the more flesh out and real they become in game. And to some extent the more we can make them come alive to the player, which is really the most important thing.
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Re: Species based language

Post by Primordial »

Going through the ships and stuff - there are a lot of 'zong's there. I suppose that is like a word for ship, or 'craft' or something?
Cheng, or variants (shen, chong, cheng, shang), etc, of that also come up a lot attached to ships with a broad spectrum of hauling/transport purposes. so I kinda figure that the ships themselves already have a sort of rough naming convention, at least in places.



I am adding a few sounds and letter combinations that work with the language.

I think this is also part of the oddity of the Rlaan language - the system names are almost entirely different from the ship names, which are great. It's an odd situation.


Here's an update on type of words that can be produced via random generation with no tinkering:

tux
zuk
etzze
oktaa
sorzrz
stizzuon
ekrli
zhkza
ztua
zhoozh
rui
hnookza
ztitra
shies
rlahst


Thoughts?
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Re: Species based language

Post by CLoneWolf »

The discrepancy between ship and system names comes from the typical Confed way of dealing with alien species :mrgreen:

While the system names are the original alien native ones, the ships (and flight groups) usually get a conventional and themed designation upon first encounter; this especially if the species is not friendly, and will rather fire their guns at you than telling you the name of their ship :wink:

Even for friendly aliens, given how hard it is to memorize words from their own language, nevermind speaking them, human-friendly names will still feel much more comfortable. Would you brag about flying a hypotetical rlahst or a better sounding taizong? ;) Think of it, it's not as Nicander, Ariston and the like sound so natively Aeran either :)
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Re: Species based language

Post by Gungnir »

This is sounding good; I can't wait until we have some intelligible names for Rlaan systems :P

By the way, what are you using to generate the test words?
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Re: Species based language

Post by Primordial »

Gungnir wrote:This is sounding good; I can't wait until we have some intelligible names for Rlaan systems :P

By the way, what are you using to generate the test words?
Awkwords and a set of rules.
I haven't worked on this for a while, university and such. I will get back to it, I think that the groundwork is mostly done, needs some fine tuning and then I suppose it'd be good to hand-polish it from there.

And other thoughts, insights and suggestions are welcome.
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Re: Species based language

Post by travists »

Gungnir
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Re: Species based language

Post by Gungnir »

Primordial wrote: Awkwords and a set of rules.
That's a nice utility, thanks!
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segfault wrote:if I was actually in space I'd totally be throwing on autopilot and relaxing in the back during the trip, sipping space wine and listening (rlaan?) jazz.
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Re: Species based language

Post by Primordial »

Huh, just checked, Awkwords is down apparently. That's unfortunate. Hope that's temporary.

Yeah, the click-sounds I was finding hard to work in there with easy readability or grace. I think a lot of people tend to just stick an apostrophe in the middle of a word and go "Yeah... that's good enough", but I find that too cliche and most people reading the words don't bother with the apostrophes, they just gloss over them because it's not very apparent why they're there. So I'm trying to find a balance between ease of communication and readability, and species-feeling. If we go with the 'random punctuation' approach, then I think we'll just end up with a different version of the same unintelligible mess we have now.

I had a brief look at the links and found that I've actually incorporated quite a few of those consonant pairings before hand, in an attempt to force a hard sound out of the words, and that was also the reason I took out a lot of the softer sounds. Ch and Sh are still there, because they feature quite heavily in Rlaan ship names and they contribute to quick hissing sounds. I've added a few more sounds, inspire by the two wiki entries, to the rules to try and reinforce the hard-clicking sounds. If awkwords comes back at some point, I'll run the rules through the generator again and see if it makes much of a difference.
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Re: Species based language

Post by pheonixstorm »

Sounds like some really good progress (with a minor annoyance of awkwords being down). I like how this is progressing so far :)
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Re: Species based language

Post by gonzo »

kimam!!!

The old page is still up:
http://bprhad.wz.cz/awkwords/index.php
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Re: Species based language

Post by Primordial »

Ah, cool.
Fifteen names with a couple of new consonant groupings in the rules:

gokz
nkea
shil
shuu
shuoch
cheeng
nhkoau
stihnhsu
ainh
hookhst
enhdide
shie
geazz
hnk
uiz


It generates a few three/four letter words, which don't sound very Rlaan-esque alone, but most modern words are derived from pairings of other older words/phrases/meanings. So, theoretically, if one of these were a root word you might come up with some thing like 'Shouchshuu' which could be boiled into something like 'Shoukshuu', or 'Aicheeng' from 'Ainh' and 'Cheeng'.
I might need to play around with patterning a bit more, but it's getting closer.
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Re: Species based language

Post by travists »

Primordial wrote: gokz
nkea
shil
shuu
shuoch
cheeng
nhkoau
stihnhsu
ainh
hookhst
enhdide
shie
geazz
hnk
uiz
Great! Names that don't need a letter by letter check when traveling. Perhaps in an ironic twist of convergent evolution "uiz" (Uzi) is a prefix meaning rapid succession, a suffix meaning great destruction, or something like that :lol:
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