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ndscottsummers · 5 years

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[cracks knuckles] okay folks here’s some thoughts on doug ramsey setting out to create a language for mutantkind, mostly ignoring what canon has to say about the matter. i am not a linguist so take what i say here with several grains of salt, but i am a conlanger so, yeah, take what i say here with several grains of salt.

doug seems like someone who probably started conlanging before his mutation manifested and then threw himself into it even more enthusiastically once he started exercising those super-pattern-detection muscles, so i’m assuming he knows what he’s about. no need to worry about him understanding the basics of the craft, we can move on to other things. (also, side note, holy shit i want to see his portfolio. i bet it’s mind-blowing.)

doug also has two huge advantages over anyone else who has ever tried to make a conlang usable in day-to-day life by people from a wide variety of linguistic backgrounds: he has that cool mutation that means he probably has a good grasp on a ridiculous number of communication systems, and there are telepaths around who can download the language from his mind and upload it into other people’s.

there are two major goals for this language:

it should be easily usable by the largest percentage of mutants possible

it should be difficult to interpret for anyone who hasn’t had it uploaded into their brain

(we’d want a signed language as well as a spoken language; i’m not familiar enough with the mechanics of signed languages as a class to know how separate those two would be or if they would be essentially the same language with different mediums of communication. the points i’m going to make should apply to any configuration with appropriate adjustments for the medium; my examples are going to be spoken language-focused bc that’s what i know.)

i don’t really know how the whole telepathic fluency thing works, so here are some assumptions: it may make sound production easier but it won’t bring you up to a native speaker’s level re: phonology, it will give you the rough equivalent of natural fluency in all other areas, and it works as well for writing and reading as it does for speaking and listening.

first things first, we want the phonology to be simple. we want to hit phonemes that appear in lots of different languages families across the globe and we want to avoid sounds that are relatively rare. sorry, huge mass of english vowels! we just want a couple. maybe four. five if we’re feeling adventurous. also say goodbye to /θ/ (the first sound of ‘think’) - that’s a rare one, globally! and, to take the focus away from english, no pharyngeals or clicks either.

we also want to avoid weird consonant clusters that might trip people up, so you know what, let’s just say that the only possible syllable structures are V and CV. no vowel clusters, either; that V syllable can be tacked onto the beginning of a word but nowhere else. if my experience is anything to go by you’re not going to be able to tear diphthongs away from the anglophones but it’s okay for there to be differing accents; we just want everyone to be able to produce + understand the language without much difficulty, and telepathy can smooth over some of the bumps.

so that’s phonology out of the way, and now we’re getting to the good stuff: morphology and syntax. telepathy means we can go absolutely WILD with this. phonology has a lot to do with muscle memory and actual physical ability to move one’s tongue and throat in certain ways, but the rest of grammar is all in the mind and as long as a telepath can put it in your head you are good to go.

sadly i don’t know that i have the experience or linguistic knowledge to propose good ideas here, but you know doug has been sitting on some sweet shit. he’s got a handle on some really obscure grammatical features, he can pull details from language isolates and extinct languages and alien languages holy shit you guys the game is won* and he can make them play nicely together. we want phonology to be simple but we want everything else to be complicated in order to stymie attempts at outside interpretation, and if we can go overboard without damaging people’s abilities to use the language then full steam ahead! (there are going to be some limitations, probably, but still; we can have fun.)

if you can drop a writing system into someone’s head then i’d want to say go logographic, but that does have a muscle memory aspect to it and also poor doug would have to figure out all of those logographs, so maybe not. an alphabet is boring and if you’re doing a 1:1 sound:letter correspondence then it’s not adding much to keeping the language secret; same with an abugida. a featural system would be a step up until part of it is cracked, at which point the dominoes start to fall. canon hoxpox already has a thing going with a combination alphabet/logography which is cool, but i think we’d be better off with a combination syllabary/logography. we’re already doing mostly CV syllables and throwing some logographs in would confuse the situation enough that the number of symbols needed to understand the language would, i think, fall nicely into the ‘learnable but difficult to figure out without a guide’ category.

if we want to go really off-script the language can be highly idiomatic as well; i’m thinking trigedasleng from the 100, which iirc evolved from an english-based code rather than mainstream english. then even if they do figure out your writing system and also somehow figure out translations for individual words, they can’t necessary interpret what it is you’re actually saying. that may or may not be more difficult to get across via telepathy, but if you went too far with it you would end up with longggg average utterances.

anyway those are my opinions on how doug would approach this project! i really, really want to see what he would make of this, wow.

*how many features of the average alien language would be comprehensible to the human mind on a level that would allow even telepathy to bridge fluency gaps? i don’t know but doug** is going to find out

**can doug even do alien languages bc of like, basic cognitive differences? he’s done them in canon but does that make sense? send in your theories

#r: house of x #r: powers of x #doug ramsey #krakoan conlang

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