EVE Fiction

Oh yes, language. What labors we pour into it, but what comes of it? What is born of these labors? Especially on these forums
parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus

Something like, "To give smoke the proper weight"(?) Which I'd speculate is used when one needs to say, "That's just nitpicking and hair-splitting."

[P.S. When is a linguist among us going to develop a Gallentean, Matari, etc. lexicon? Trekkies have Klingon, where are our New Eden languages?]

Fun to see likeminded people.

Latin when used on bios, corp names and all that is idiotic, person who uses this language has mostly googled his latin statements and mostly likely doesnt even understand this dead language.

Ps. I prefer esperanto

Doh! Disregard this post.

Its been a bit since I posted another Latin phrase, but I figured that we all need to lighten up a bit. So... next time you are in a heated argument with someone on whatever channel on whatever forum, try on this Latin zinger as a rebuff.

First person to give my the equivalent English idiom wins a cameo mention on The DSTON log.

Tu mihi manducare INDUCULA!

That's one of Bart Simpson's lines! "Eat my shorts!"

oh right duh... what am i thinking of?
now that think of it... i might even be an intaki.... :P

This assumption is flawed, it is based on the thesis that catholic refers to only the Roman Catholics, when in reality it includes the Orthodox churches and others.

The word Catholic is Latin but it has no direct modern word with equivalent semantics it's original meaning is a combination of universal, the whole and meaning or about. The meaning of Church also has a much wider meaning including something like the "worldwide body of worshippers" and not the modern usage of just a building for (Christian) worship.

So the Unified Catholic Church semantics equate to something like the Unified & Universal Meaningful body of worshippers.

However If you look at the Amarr, especially the different houses they are clearly representative of the various Abrahamic religions including Islam and Judaism along with Theosophy and Paganism.

Along with Greek It should also be recognised for it's wide use in science (and lesser extent technology) for it power to construct new compound words. Therefore remnants of wide scale usage in modern language and New Eden languages does not imply a Christian or Roman Catholic foundation.

I admit that I'm no great friend of artificial languages, maybe because I have so much respect for the native ones. There are many good arguments against artificial languages, but the first and most important is that the creators of this underestimate the difficulties. Second important is that this language will only be understandable to the initiate which is not lowering the barrier for good roleplay but instead pushing it higher.

Languages have been good part of my education after finishing school. And if I might point out some problems with creating a language is for example that I have never seen one that even would catch up with the complexibility of BASIC ENGLISH. Which would be a strip down english that even every native speaking child would speak better.

But we are facing the problem to create poetry, to create cultural background and that and an artificial language would just hamper attempts in doing that instead of helping. "The Klingon original of Shakespeare" would just be pitiful, cause the language does not give even the limited depth of the English one. (Which wants to say Shakespeare is a genius that he achieved to write pieces like that one in a "very very" expression-limited language like English. Well he was not using the language that is left of it nowadays. Well the second genius I'd say would be Henry Miller. But he used what he had at our times. Maybe it should be fair to mention Charles Bukowski at this point.) Cultural background is more important than YAOAL (Yet An Other Artificial Language)-project. (Over the years I had to learn a lot of computer languages, more than I like to count to be honest. Must be over a hundred and I feel the urge to puke if I see one more - which most likely I have to every few months or so.)

So while I completely understand that it's a bit disturbing to use native languages for RP purposes and that some people want to use the alien-style of artificial languages I'd suggest to chose an other path to achieve that. My suggestion would be an automatic translator-system, a system of encoding. This is sounding a lot more complicated than it is and it is way better to implement than a complete new language.

First you can begin to start with a character substitute mechanism. Which means you can chose any font you like and simply convert words into this new font.

This can be quite effective. This kind of code can be found for example in the pigpen cipher or in for example in gold-bug cipher and many more ciphers that would exchange a letter with some other letter from the (unicode)-alphabet or just switch them like in the cesar cipher but keeping the vovels and consonants as they are.

This would be easy to reconstruct and also keeps the writing alienated enough.

The next step would be to substitute sounds, means letter-combinations with others and finally there are simple word-exchange mechanism like in a codebook. For this purpose I do not think about real codebooks which would need to find substitutes for thousands of words but to use an algorithm for this that simplifies it.

If you start to substitute bigrams or trigrams with new combinations you easily get complete new words that still sound like a language. To substitute syllables is a good method, too. If you put in "xx" and "lll" and things like that it is looking like welsh or other celtic languages soon.

Then there is the method to kill some characters like for example t' kll th' vwls. But this sort of cipher might by hard to read afterwards because if you encipher with leaving out certain characters you might face problems with mixing up words and things like that. Well, the Arabic language does not write down the vowels, so it would be a method to use.

If you want different grammar you can try to use certain simple changes like seen in Star Wars "Yoda" language for example, where simply the order of words in the grammar have been changed. So simple algorithmic grammatical changes to a common language would do the job easily without inventing a new one.

But whatever you do if you start to encode the writing of your text you should know that you are narrowing the amount of people that are able to understand your language. And this, I think, is not a desirable effect. I can say I'm definitely not happy with the idea to create a new language for every ethnic group of New Eden.

It's annoying enough that so many people just speak English and haven't seen a second language in their life. I'd for example accept every kind of Nordic/Northern European language as a dialect for some of the Matari tribes. Maybe pimped up a bit with some different fonts but why not? There are more people that understand Icelandic than Klingon on this planet…

The development of new languages have always been a sign of people to close a group up to foreigners. Only on very rare occasions it was used for opening up. A new language is a cipher, is a code. It keeps more people away than drawing them in.

That's why I'd speak against a new artificial language and prefer to keep those "in game" that are on earth. Galactic standard is for sure not English anyway. So why does every ethnic group need a new, artificial one now? Where is the gain of this?

If you like to do this, I suggest, use algorithms. This is easy to undo and made readable again.

I'm unsettled by player attempts to define new fictional languages for Eve. On the old forum, we had made quite a lot of progress discovering evidence of proto-languages in New Eden lore.