#vulcan: language

[agent-troi]

linguistics is fun:

- from the latest mensa bulletin

- from the novel spock’s world by @dduane

[eldar-of-zemlya]

What can be better than Jim speaking Vulcan? Jim speaking dirty in Vulcan.

You can find the uncropped version here.

[fxoye]

i just made up vulcan swear words. feel free to use them because i curse when i narrate and it’s becoming harder and harder not to curse at all in spock’s pov.

f’tak: fuck. simple, easy, similar. to the point.

shak: shit. i just pictured myself shouting shak and i see it.

zor-tok: bullshit. idk but this one i just imagine spock saying it and i giggle.

kahrkann: asshole. the similarities between kann and kahn are pure coincidence.

kesh: damn. i don’t know, sounds easy to say when you stub your little toe.

P.S. do NOT @ me about canon lore and this being inconsistent and vulcans not cursing because they are in essence logical beings and cursing betrays an emotion. vulcans ARE emotional beings, mind you. they simply choose to contain their emotions because they feel DEEPER than other species and it’s been the root of many of their conflicts. but they do feel. and thus to me it only makes sense they curse. or they did, pre-reform times. anyway this is a silly post. <3

[odva-vuhlkansu]

Been experimenting with different brushes

[urghblergh]

Halloween. Spock is confused. :D

You married a Vulcan???????????? :o

These ones feel kind of random and weird. Idk. 😅🫶🌌

reference pics ✨

@senshistock

this picture I found on pinterest 😅

[benrybenrybenry-chr]

fascinated by vulcans being touch telepaths, like these idiots just CONSTANTLY reading a mfs electrical signals—oOOoOooooOoOo I FELT the chemicals in your brain do a little thing BITCH. yeah. yeah. that's right, I just made our brains into a closed circuit so we can share thoughts. you're welcome.

[makeallthingsyours]

The Little Vulcan Handbook for English speakers

This is a book(let) containing the basic words and phrases needed for communication in Vulcan as well as the basics of Vulcan grammar. While there are resources such as the Vulcan Language Dictionary or the Vulcan Language Institute, this book's purpose is not to contain the entirety of the language but rather serve as an introduction and enable basic communication. It does not contain any guide regarding writing in Vulcan. There is also a complementing set of online flashcards.

The Little Vulcan Hnadbook for English speakers on Quizlet: https://quizlet.com/pl/818858277/the-little-vulcan-hnadbook-for-english-speakers-flash-cards/?x=1jqU&i=2dsg3x

Live Long and Prosper.

[jeeaark]

Ok! So. After the in game sexy squiddy times thing, I can’t help but view tentacle holding as *very* intimate. As such… I wonder if Gg grabbing emp’s tentacle when he first met him in squid form didn’t help Emps have *feeling* and if this here in the recent comic is something like an awkward smooch

Again, to each their own interpretation! CAN"T GO WRONG WITH THAT INTERPRETATION EITHER asdkjfasd it's very cute actually I only know what happens when you take the uh-failed kissy kiss pathway, so I didn't uh quite find out how it went with the actual kissy kissy wiggly danglers pathway.

SO- Whatever love language Greyg and Emps trial-and-errored off-screen together while fiddling at fuddling during that one astral plane time is between them and whatever Orpheus couldn't mentally shut out. I like to think tentacle-holding isn't always equivalent to romantic intimacy. Maybe not to Greygold anyway. Because if Greygold can't high-five with their tentacle, a high-tent if you will, their bud without somebody blushing, Greygold is gonna be flabbergasted.

Maybe there's a casual way to tentacle-holding and a hollywood-esque romantically-charged way to tentacle-holding. Which one is which though? Hell if I know.

[firstroseofspring]

memory, death and life as komerex zha, the perpetual game; klingon culture as depicted in the final reflection, by john m. ford

[caityjay13]

many cultures have idioms to express the sentiment of "it is what it is" but vulcans have a single, two-syllable word and if that doesn't tell you something about a people I don't know what to tell you

[jennelikejennay]

Studying some Vulcan lately, for fun and profit. It's driving me a little nuts because I've studied a lot of languages (French Latin Greek Spanish Old English Quenya (I'm only really competent in Latin though)) and made up my own languages and it is such an illogical language. Seriously half the verbs conjugate a little bit and some don't conjugate at all? And some of the pronouns are longer than the nouns? A nice graceful language like Latin can say "I said" in one word (dixī) but Vulcan can't do it without a whole pile of words (vesht tar-tor nash-veh).

I can get around this by saying it developed organically, of course, there are pre-surakian holdovers, there probably used to be different pronouns which were replaced by other things for respectful reasons,* different dialects melded.

*what really gets me is that "I" is "nash-veh," (this one), and why would you have two whole syllables to replace a one syllable name like "Spock"? But considering Mexican Spanish dropped its perfectly useful second person plural for "usted," from vuestra merced, your grace, I can't argue that this wouldn't happen in real life. It just makes it heckin annoying to say "I want my book" (Aitlu nash-veh dunap t'nash-veh).

Of course Doylistically the reason is that Vulcan was used in canon for some time before anyone actually made it up. It was just gibberish that later got analyzed and turned into a language.

But man, Klingon was much easier. I never studied it seriously but I do know a couple things and the only thing that's really hard about it is the consonants.

ANYWAY, given all that, you'd think I would lose interest but instead I'm thinking of writing a (very short) fic in Vulcan 🤣 Hey, there's no better way to learn than by doing!

[eldar-of-zemlya]

I once stumbled upon some obscure piece of canon that described an ancient Vulcan ritual of standing naked in the rain to absorb rainwater.

I immediately pictured Jim accidentally finding Spock performing one of those... "rituals" while on a shore leave.

And, of course, I couldn't keep myself from drawing it!

Based on this post by @lesbianrustcohle and this fic by Raven_Knight!

[thegroundhogdidit]

hi all did you know that there's a plural form of t'hy'la. it's t'hylara. finally i know what to call mcspirk in vulcan

[lesbospirk]

Since I spent time creating Vulcan words just so I can have a petname I liked for T'Lyn to use on Mariner, I thought I'd share for anyone else who cares lmao Read under the cut!

This was mostly for me, since in my head Mari'Lyn doesn't fit the vibe of most Vulcan terms of endearment. I think most terms are very cute and lovey in their reserved way, which is nice, but it doesn't really mesh well with Mariner's commitment issues, and I don't really see T'Lyn being affectionate in a typical (but Vulcan) way. They are both rebels in their own right.

So I started scouring around the Starbase-10's Vulcan dictionary, and I wanted to play on that idea of being a rebel. Turns out there is no official Vulcan word for rebel (at least that I could find). :( Boo.

So I took from words that were similar:

Tehnau- Resist

Tehnaya - Resistance

Cool, now I just have to make it into a descriptor for a person. The word for people/person in Vulcan is Sular. And I saw that a lot of these types of descriptors used -su as a suffix to denote "a person who ___" . So I took the root from both words (Tehna-) and combined it with the prefix and got;

Tehnasu - A person who resists; AKA a Rebel

Awesome! But not quite there. Not romantic enough. I wanted to show some kind of posession in the word.

There isn't a word per say for My however there is a prefix that denotes ownership, that being T' (as seen famously in T'hy'la). Which when added makes T'Tehnasu.

Ugly. Uninspired. Hard to say. Unsexy. So I took the most common Spirk pet name and disected it

Ashayam - Beloved

I split it into two parts; the root Ashaya meaning love and the pulled the suffix -yam implied to be possessive in a specific affectionate context (I know ya is already in Ashaya but it works better imo as the whole syllable rather than just -m). Combined it makes;

Tehnayam - My Rebel (Affectionate)

Beautiful. Sexy. Rolls off the tounge. It kinda has the same vibe as calling someone a bad boy, like a hot rule breaker type. I think it's very fitting and I am really excited to use it in a fic. <3

And if you like it, use it! I'm not claiming ownership, and I'm not gonna get upset at people for using it (even if it's not Mari'Lyn haha). I just love messing with words/language and I wanted to share since Vulcan has so little petnames in it.

[rainbowresurrection]

Still Thinking.

In TOS there was a lot of promise on fleshing out the Vulcan culture. You get phrases in Vulcan before you ever get any phrases in Klingon. Which makes it interesting that moving forward, you learn much more about the Klingon language.

As a language lover I'd be interested to know what the body of the Vulcan language would have looked like, had it been more officially explored. You know it would be filled with dichotomy, due to the ancient and ritualistic roots of the language versus the need for utmost logic, which would influence both grammatical structure and the writing system(s).

From what I've seen, the writing leans far more on the "ancient tradition" end of things. It's beautiful, yet it is lacking in terms of practicality.

I like to imagine that they would have multiple modes of writing- the loopy cursive writing for religious and cultural / ceremonial practices, and maybe a more standardized and phonetic script for daily use (likely to also be vertical and cursive, but can be written horizontally as well). Also I'm not sure how phonetic it is to begin with so I'm just making shit up here.

Well I know one thing for sure, they have at least 2 scripts, based on the writing seen on Spock's robes vs other scenarios (perhaps Old Vulcan or Ceremonial Vulcan).

Another fun thing I like to imagine is that perhaps Vulcan follows a root based system like Hebrew or Arabic. For example in the male names, the most common denominator is S----K or S--R--K.

SpocK, SaReK, SuRaK

Women, it is the letter T.

T'Pring, T'Pau

Both genders use the consonant P.

sPock, t'Pring

So, those consonants could be based on a certain shared notion, whereas the vowels change the nuance of the translation.

Arabic (Modern Standard) example, paying attention to the consonants:

KeTeBe = writing

KiTaaB = book

MeKTaB = desk

MeKTaBe = library

(sorry for the weak transliterations, it makes more sense looking at it in Arabic, you'll see the commonality in the consonants):

كتب

كتاب

مكتب

مكتبة

[makeallthingsyours]

Differences between day to day life on Vulcan and on Earth

• Weekdays

On Earth, traditionally, week lasts seven days. Typically, five of those are working days and two are not. On Vulcan, the week lasts five days, honoring the five basic tenets of Vulcan philosophy (See: 'Surak's Construct'). Four days are working days, and one is a free day. It is meant to honor the fifth tenet - privacy, as it allows a person to tend to their private affairs.

• Workday

On Earth an average working day would last eight hours out of the twenty four there are in the day. On Vulcan, the day is slightly longer, but the average Vulcan still works about eight hours a day. That is, however, often divided into two four hour periods with a two hour break in the middle, when the temperature piques. It is a well liked carry over from times before climate. control.

• Meals

On Earth, the typical schedule includes two bigger meals, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Due to the high temperatures many Vulcan regions reach in mid-day and Vulcan physiology, it is customary to eat two meals during the day, one early in the morning and one late in the evening.

Meals are usually taken in silence, however, conversation is commonplace when only drinking beverages.

High and low tables are equally common on Vulcan, however the low table setting is considered more traditional and hence, formal.

The idea of 'cocktail party' has been introduced to Vulcans early in the Earth-Vulcan relations, however, it didn't stick, mostly due to the fact that the art of dividing time between eating and talking was never discovered on the planet. During the few that did take place, most of the Vulcan guests either talked and didn't eat or ate and didn't talk.

As it is custom on Vulcan to avoid touching food with one's hands, there are many more kinds of utensils that enable one to eat almost every conceivable type of food that way.

• Letters

Vulcan has, essentially, four separate alphabets - El'ru-Kitaun (handwriting), Vanu-Tanaf-Kitaun (calligraphy), Gotavlu-Zukitan (standard print) and a modernized print that gains popularity in bigger cities. While most citizens are capable of reading all of them, it is common for city residents to only be able to write in calligraphic script by hand, as every-day handwriting is not as popular there as it is in rural regions.

• Clothes

It is, to say the least, not customary for adult Vulcans to wear split garments in a way that is visible. If one is wearing any kind of trousers or bloomers, it would ussually remain hidden underneath a long robe. The only circumstances, in which it wouldn't be considered a bit unusual to wear visible trousers are sports, manual labor, travel by foot or on beastback, and work in which loose fabric could cause danger, for example on a space vessel That is the reason for the skin tight garments commonly worn by the crews of Vulcan spaceships.

• Windows

It is something that might easily confuse and Earthling, but Vulcan buildings often lack glass in the windows. It is very common, especially in houses, that windows are only covered with curtains, as it allows better air circulation without unnecessary air conditioning. Glass is, however, used in a different manner. Many houses have a basement with a glass roof, functioning as an indoor greenhouse.

• Holidays

Vulcan Clan holidays (weddings, betrothal, historic anniversaries, successful kahs'wan celebrations, etc.) as opposed to the common holidays, which are ussually celebrated in private, are typically long and involve gathering tens or even hundreds of people in a Clan Home. (It is a big building belonging to someone in the clan, most often the Matriarch. Every member of the Clan has the right to come and stay there however long they please.) If the Clan Home is too small by itself, tents would be put up on the grounds.

Vulcan employers are typically very liberal with granting leaves of absence for Clan/House/Family reasons (Vulcan, similarly to Earth, is considered to be a post-scarcity world, so with the exception of people bound by contracts eg. Starfleet, the majority doesn't strictly need to work. It has its benefits, of course but missing a few weeks worth of pay doesn't change much.), so one can often expect to stay at such celebration for days, or in some cases, weeks.

• Laundry:

Vulcans have a slightly different attitude towards it then the one cultivated on Earth. Outermost garments are generally only washed if they get dirty and even then, they would ussually be only spot cleaned with water and detergent. Traditionally, one would only wash their underwear with water, while the rest of the clothes would be regularly aired and layed out in the sun. While in the modern day, sonic cleaners are getting more and more popular, the traditional route is still very much in use, as it is very much sufficient to maintain both hygiene and neatness.