Shadowrun
Shadowrun General => General Discussion => Topic started by: savaze on <03-24-11/0438:34>
-
How wide spread would the 'new' languages be? I suppose it could be fairly trendy to know some Sperethiel or Or’zet. Are they taught in schools or only learned in subcultures? The generations after the languages reemerged could learn the languages fairly easily if taught early on, I suppose, but who would teach it to them? How did they get to be so wide spread so fast? A matrix movement? Runner Lingo? SINless speak? A new version of Pig-Latin for pre-teens?
Interesting side story: There was an ad in the paper, about a decade ago, for a fluent speaker of Klingon. A tech company in the Silicon Valley had a policy of doing all negotiations in each parties native language. Apparently one party had super Trekkie parents or was having fun with the fine print.
Late night thoughts from the sleepless...
-
Maybe this fits better into 'The Secret History' category?!
-
Sperethiel is heavy in the "Elven Culture" group due to the Tir Nations, and if you're an elf wearing a Neo-Celtic outfit, it might be a first person's attempt to talk to you. It's also used in Soft Pop Songs due to it's musical nature, which gets some people interested in learning it.
Or'Zet has caught on with the "Gangsta Trog" scene, and a lot of Ork and Troll groups have grabbed onto it with both hands as a part of their "Lost Culture", and hold onto it, TIGHTLY. That said, most people know how to at least swear and pick up prostitutes in it due to Rap and Trog Rock songs. :P
Of course, that's for people who want to be part of that "Culture". My Elven Wheelman, Nas, sees himself as Texan, and literally punches people for the "Elven Culture" thing as he sees it as "Artificial" and "Fake", an attempt at twisting perceptions for some perverse means. This mindset comes from his overly racist Grandfather ("To be fair, Grandpa hated everyone. Until you proved yourself a good person, you were a stereotype of a bad culture.").
-
Linguist here. Endangered languages are a big deal right now.
The big thing that jumps out at me as potentially a game changer is the linguasoft. With a lot of disappearing languages, especially those in North America, one of the hard parts about teaching young people the language is providing an immersive environment, since there are so few speakers. With the advent of the linguasoft, now, you wanna raise your kids speaking Cherokee at home? Plop down a few hundreds (or maybe not, it's probably subsidized in the NAN) and get a linguasoft for you and your wife. Practically effortless. Same thing goes for teachers for immersion schools, preschools et al. Between that and the cultural shifts of the Awakening, I think some degree of language revitalization makes sense.
That said, a lot of languages might be too far gone, and SR has made some odd choices about which survive. Hopi and Zuni each have speaker numbers in the four digit range. Navajo is far and away the strongest Native language in the US, by comparison. Yet the former become prevalent in Pueblo and not the latter? That's dumb as all hell.
As far as which survive and would be prevalent if SR made sense...here's my personal bets. The Salish languages are probably too far gone, so I imagine you're more likely to hear Sperethiel or Cantonese in the SSC than any Native language. I could see the various Sioux languages making a comeback, though, and Cherokee is probably strong enough to hold its own inside the Sioux state. In the AMC, Cree, Ojibwe and Saulteaux (if you count that as sufficiently separate from Ojibwe) are probably all going to do ok. Hell, there's Cree monolinguals even today, just not very many. And all three of those have some degree of mutual intelligibility. The Ute languages are probably too far gone, realistically speaking, as are the northern Iroquian tongues. I could see Athabaska having some degree of strength for a variety of languages, especially in smaller isolated population centers like Yellowknife, but probably not a single dominant one across the vast region. And in the TPA probably there are a lot more Inuktitut speakers than English speakers. Then again, there are probably also more Icelandic speakers than English speakers, and a decent size group of Russian speakers, and many of these groups will overlap. Outside the NAN, like, in Australia the only group that has a shot at surviving is the Western Desert language/dialect group, which has about four thousand speakers, whereas most Aboriginal languages have, like, five speakers. Siberia I'm not as familiar with the languages in, and in most other places the minority languages aren't likely to come out in bad shape.
Sperethiel I've always imagined as a creolized mixture of Old Sperethiel, Dublin Irish and English, to explain a lot of the use of Irish terms as "Sperethiel". This would predict it to be strong in Tir na Nog at least, and I imagine others might pick it up as an elven lingua franca. And I imagine it's that lingua franca usage also driving Or'zet, which is probably closer to the original, as a language all orks across the globe can communicate in.
-
That was supremely insightful, thank you!
-
Well, Modern Hebrew was started as a living (again) language from the ground up for reasons of national identity, so the same could happen in SSC and Ute, or not? I mean, thing is, if those two have no surviving languages any more, what will they in fact speak? English in the population, of course, but the state apparatus? Especially in especially amerindian-proud Ute? At least there might be a situation like Tir Tairngire: English is the most widely used language (which is, I think, also the situation in canon anyway), but not the official language. And in decentralised SSC it will really depend on what part of the territorial patchwork you're currently on, most likely.
-
But there's differences between these cases and Modern Hebrew that I'm seeing. For one, many immigrants to Israel didn't share any other languages besides their knowledge of Hebrew, whereas the vast bulk of inhabitants of the SSC and Ute began as monolingual English speakers. Hebrew filled a societal gap of a common language for the new nation-state, but no such gap exists in the SSC or Ute. Furthermore, they'd have to decide on one variety over another to try and revive, which could prove a massive headache.
I could see a situation like you're describing where the Ute state apparatus uses Paiute or something, but the population largely speaks English instead, even given the level of hostility between assimilated or actual Native Ute citizens and unassimilated Anglos in that country. And the balkanization of the SSC might play a role. But I think you and I are on the same page that those nations' citizens for the most part are likely to be most comfortable using English. I'm not sure that would be the case for the Pueblo, say, which could very well have a large number of Navajo or Spanish speakers less than fluent in English.
-
Pueblo is noted for having bolstered its population numbers by "grandfathering in" lots of Hispanics (which apparently is a touchy issue among the NAN, too), so yes, Spanish might actually eclipse English there. And yes, Navajo (realistically) or Zuni and Hopi (canonically ;) ), too, maybe.
Of course, that's another issue - all population numbers in the NAN are unrealistic like hell. So in a manner of speaking one could say if the canon just so snips fingers summoning up millions of more Amerindians, it also can snip fingers to summon up millions of more speakers of Amerindian languages ;)
-
@Carve037; As an amateur linguist (to this day when ever someone says "do you like IPA" I look at them like their weird until I realize they're talking about beer) I agree with you. There's been two completely unfounded assumptions for Shadowrun History that I make in order to take care of the NAN language issue; 1. Starting in the 1960's (and maybe earlier) Native American birth rates began to increase dramatically. 2. In the early years of the Awakening there were Native American "aspected" spirits (often free spirits) that helped to revive/expand/teach the old tongues.
Again, there isn't anything in the canon, that I can remember, that supports either of those two assumptions...they're just "facts" I made up so I don't grumble about how insanely unrealistic the NAN would be if starting from ~1990 divergent SR timeline as written. :)
-
Yeah, Fizzy, I think some kind of assumption's necessary to make any of it make sense. I guess I'd always leaned more towards an interpretation where a lot of the non-Natives in the area reverse-assimilated culturally. With that interpretation, you get decent size populations for NAN states, but not necessarily large speaker numbers for the languages. So I think it depends on what assumptions you're making. With your assumption set, larger speaker numbers are probably viable.
And the IPA thing? Happens to us all, lol.
-
Or`zet was given to Orks by Big D`s will at sixties, so it couldnt be native (mother) language for anyone...
-
Don't know why I didn't think of this before, but losing a Native Tongue is a major issue in Canada, due to our Multicultural heritage and, well, the treatment of the First Nations Peoples, along with the corruption of French in Canada.
French-Canadian is a very complex language, with a lot of English Loanwords, along with dialects that I have just found out are massively different. Northern Ontarian French-Canadian is massively different from Southern-Manitoban French. I knew Acadian-French and Québécois were exceptionally different, but had not expected such a drift in what would be "close" languages.
I'd go more into it, but I think I'd bore the Non-Linguists.
-
Or`zet was given to Orks by Big D`s will at sixties, so it couldnt be native (mother) language for anyone...
2057 was Dig D's Will. S it's now been 16 years in game... With Orks having a slightly faster maturation cycle, it's possible that a fw very young, just starting out Shadowrunner Orks might speak Or'zet naturally. Very few, but in a few years it'll start becoming more common... though I imagine the language will se a lot of corruptions.
Bull
-
That actually has been said in publications even when Or'zet came right out: It got corrupted right from the beginning. Or, more neutrally said, it seems to have a higher mutation rate than other languages. Which probably is also magnified again by the shorter orcish generations...
-
Not to mention what Gangsta Rap does to a language...
-
Not to mention what Gangsta Rap does to a language...
You have no idea how much the concept of "Ork Culture and Ork language as SR substitute for Gangsta Rap speak and culture" irritated the hell out of me Still does. Ahh well.
-
Why do something original when you can just steal it?
Personally, I'm still a major fan of Trog Rock.
-
It's likely that with the ever increasing immersion of the web and so much time passing (80 years from the 90's) that 'pure' languages, or even something that we would recognize, would have mutated wildly and really only exist in academia and maybe 3rd world countries that have limited communication (unless a dictator started a purist movement)...
When I can't sleep I like to ponder about how some things would really work and see what everyone else can put into my wild meanderings. I don't hold SR at fault with the ideas that don't really hold up. A bunch of gamers got together and made a universe that they thought would be fun to play in and they didn't have all the expertise to completely flesh out and eliminate all the inconsistencies. It turns out that they made an awesome place to drop by and spend some time with friends. Perhaps that's all that counts as far as SR is concerned.
-
*holds up hand like a kid wanting permission to ask a question*
Is there, somewhere in this big 'ol internet of ours, a reference sheet of some kind or lexicon of common slang words for Shadowrun? I mean besides the classic ones like frag, drek, slot, geek and so on. Maybe some common words and sentences in some of the major languages of the world, just to add a bit of cosmopoticism flair to my game?
Thanks.
-
This one (http://www.shadowrun4.com/game-resources/slang-guidebook/) on CGL's site, though it's geared towards SR1-3 (it still has "decker" in it). I've seen people link to others, so I'm sure they'll be along eventually to point you to something more up to date.
-
This one (http://www.shadowrun4.com/game-resources/slang-guidebook/) on CGL's site, though it's geared towards SR1-3 (it still has "decker" in it). I've seen people link to others, so I'm sure they'll be along eventually to point you to something more up to date.
Merci.