#i feel like I'd have to draw a language tree to deacribe it.. how there can be multiple levels of dissociation from English

[ranticore]

some day I'm going to have to bite the bullet and actually work on air language in siren. this is the abovewater language family and it descends directly from english but every part of the world would have taken that base and run in a different direction with it. at the moment place names are just whatever the literal meaning (Spire, Dry Bowl, Dry Breaks, etc) of the actual spoken name which is in a different language. it'd be like me calling athenry "king's fortress" whenever i mention going there.

I have a bit of a start on it in the form of Signaswun and Signastoo, the longwing swan visors. it's a corrupted precursor callsign with original meaning lost (Cygnus 1 and 2). Now the alphabet will not be the same but I could work my way around how the language evolved to twist those words. So for a place like Spire, it would go -> original precursor-given English name -> +n years drift -> Corrupted Place Name -> a spire is built there -> it becomes Corrupted Place Name + evolved English term for Spire. so some parts of the name would be older and closer to Precursor English, some would be newer and adapted from whatever Evolved English forms in this region, bearing in mind how much language will be lost by becoming untethered from Earth, how much will need to form from scratch for the same reason. etc. If you are an actual linguist the above post will appear to have been written by a six year old