#it's all the word I tend to translate as 'kin'/'family'/'fam' lol but gendered by english-speakers for comprehension

[splickedylit]

excerpting

Domestic Diplomacy II is turning out to be even more "splickedy gratuitously gets caught in the weeds of xenosociology and alien language barriers, the fic sequel" and tbh I'm not mad about it

--

“Oh, your moirail!” says Jade, and bounces upright, ignoring John’s wary little soft human cautionary hiss.  To your vague surprise, she’s apparently learned enough not to do the human holding-out-a-hand gesture they usually do when they’re introduced; she clasps her hands in front of her, nonexistent claws politely folded in, and ducks her head briefly forward and to one side, careful not to jab at him with her nonexistent horns. 

It's a pretty passable greeting—for a social equal, which is its own bizarre issue, considering he’s a highblood.  But relatively non-offensive, for a human, and fortunately for her she’s picked a highblood who isn’t likely to give a shit.  Gamzee laughs out loud and gives his own lazy-ass version of a greeting back, a vague twist of his wrists and dip of his head, condescending to use an equal’s greeting back at her.   When he says “Gamzee Makara,” there’s a hint of a threatening buzz to it, a testing you should know to respect me warning—you could have told him she’d show absolutely no sign of hearing it, which is exactly what happens.

“I’m Jade Harley!  I meet you,” Jade says, a carefully neutral statement-of-fact greeting—not fawning or hostile.  You don’t know if humans are out here just learning neutral address no matter what, or if this human particularly just doesn’t give a shit that your moirail’s a fuck-off mutant-huge highblood with horns that scrape the ceiling of the block—by the expectant way she looks up at Gamzee afterward, she wouldn’t give much of a shit either way.  Out of all of the humans, Jade Harley might actually win the prize for giving the least shits, no matter what Rose and Dave like to pretend.

“Yeah, I meet you too, motherfucker,” says Gamzee, looking incredibly amused, and glances down at you.  “She’s a rude-ass little motherfuckin’ toothful, huh?  I like her.”

“Of course you do,” you say, pained.  “Don’t take it personally, alright?  You’re not a highblood here, they don’t get highbloods.”

“Oh, best friend,” says Gamzee, and kisses your nugbone again, embarrassingly.  “I’m a highblood wherever the fuck I go.  It’s cool though.  Squishy-ass little motherfuckers won’t get any grief from me.”

“<Motherfucker>,” Jade repeats behind you, and switches back to English, in the bright, wide verbal tone you’re starting to learn means ‘smiling and happy’, weird interstitial ‘vowel’ breath-sounds further back in the throat through pulled-back mouth-corners.  “Hmm, <motherfucker>…  Oh, neat!  Is that dialect?  It sounds like, ahh, what’s that other word.  Kk—kkkht—  Uh, dammit.  You guys need to learn how to use vowels—  It sounds like <;brother>.”

“It is like,” you say, surprised despite yourself.  “&lt;Brother> is a troll, and <motherfucker> you put it all spots you want.  It’s a thing, it’s a troll, it’s a, tss, a doing-things word, it’s a name.  It’s bad, it’s good.  Any spot you want.  And he does want, for all those, all the time.”

[splickedylit]

please tell me more about the stuff in the tags of your last fic, I love xenolinguistics! What if brother and sister were just correlated do to our gendernorms? What is sister in Alternian?

I mean, to be clear, that post is an excerpt, and far from the full fic which is still in process! But uhhh let's see. So in the tags you're addressing, I said

"what if 'motherfucker' and 'brother' are translated different but they're related words in alternian…. #what if 'brother' and 'sister' aren't different words theyre just translated in english based on gender but there's no distinction actually #it's all the word I tend to translate as 'kin'/'family'/'fam' but gendered by english-speakers for comprehension"

My thought wasn't that there was a word for "sister" in Alternian, any more than a word for "brother"! In keeping with the minimal amount of gendering I try to do when I write trolls, I was thinking there could be a single word that just basically means "troll who is part of my 'family'", (although "family" here is its own kettle of fish on Alternia, more on that later). To a conversational learner of Alternian, it would be fairly natural to translate it according to the gender of the person being addressed, since calling someone "brother" or "sister" has more linguistic precedent than the gender-neutral address I've used in clown-fics before, which is "kin".

(I don't think I got that from canon, as far as I remember I came up with that because I wanted more queer characters and needed a gender-neutral church term of address for them, lol).

Bear in mind my worldbuilding is also partially predicated on the way I tend to write the clown church, which is a little more based on real life juggalos than some clown churches I've seen written in fics--I like the idea that purplebloods are still violent assholes to each other, but that they have a weird kind of cohesion, a default allyship with each other via the church that isn't quadranted and isn't necessarily in cahoots, but just expects a certain amount of kinship. "Family", or "troll-closer-than-friend", something that's not quite a quadrant but is closer than the average troll gets to have with other trolls, usually. I like the thought of other blood castes finding that deeply unsettling--and I also feel like it makes a certain amount of sense; both for the sort of weird troll equivalent of an ethnoreligious group and also for a comparatively smaller ruling class that has to keep the much more numerous, psionically-gifted masses in line.

But also as individuals they will certainly still challenge, undercut, and murder each other sometimes haha. They're Alternian trolls after all. ANYWAY

Terms of address in Alternian are actually a really fun concept, especially if I was playing around with the concept I talked about a little in later tags on that same post--that you can present yourself as a superior, inferior, or intentionally give zero inflection either way, which is risky in its own way if the person you're speaking to doesn't agree that you're equals. That actually meshes nicely with one of the few bits of xenolinguistics we do get in the comic, which is that apparently the troll word for "friend" is the same as the word for "enemy"! Which you could work in a couple of ways!

the word just essentially does mean "friend"/"troll I'm close to"--if you are actually friends, then cool. If not, it becomes more like a guy in a bar calling you "pal" and stepping into your space. Humans have their own dominance and submission tone indicators, and imposing closeness or familiarity on a person you aren't familiar with to that degree can be a threat in any language, so it would feel right to me if Alternian had the same thing but much more aggressively codified.

The word is understood as "friend" when it's said in a submissive/friendly/fawning stance, and "enemy" when it's said by a superior or dominant troll. This is actually also fun because it means that unless a highblood is explicitly lowering themself to use a less dominant tone, they're speaking to their social inferiors with pretty overt hostility.

To bring it back around to the original topic, I honestly like option two a little better--if any term of address can be dominant/hostile, submissive/fawning or neutral/equal, then Gamzee when he's introduced using the "equals" inflection of "brother/sister/etc" would carry on his canon vibe of not really acting like A Real Highblood. And then when murderstuck hit, he could drop all the way to a supposedly super friendly and harmless inflection on the "it's me :o)" sentences and an aggressive one on the "AND ALSO ME :o(" sentences.

"Motherfucker" is a fun one because carrying on the thought I was having in those tags, I was imagining "motherfucker" would be a very similar word in Alternian to "kin"--but smushed together with the Alternian for "fuck" and used in all sorts of ungrammatical ways. "Motherfucker" would make sense to me as an Anglicization of a word that in Alternian might mean something more like "(friend-closer-than-friend)fucker". After all, trolls don't have mothers--I think I've written before with the alternate headcanon that it refers to the Mother Grub, and is kind of profane/gross in that sense, but I also like the concept that part of the reason that we see so many purplebloods throwing "motherfuck(ing/er)" around is because they're also the ones who have a concept of "family" via the church, and a nonexistent translator was like "for readability I have not translated this literally but have instead used the nearest human equivalent" lol.