The Pow of Languages

'Nother post title evocative of the Languages of Pao, this time about languages and SF, especially sf languages.

But first, mini-rant: why don't old people on the internet understand the rules? The two rudest, most netiquette-disregarding people I've ever encountered on the webs were in their forties and fifties—and apparently rules like "don't mock others' handles" or "don't post anonymously" had never penetrated the calcified edifice of their senility. Also, they love throwing around words like "troll" and "cyberbully" in blatantly incorrect ways.

I occasionally treat people condescendingly on teh interwebs, but only if they say things that reveal them to be slackjawed halfwits. That's not trolling or cyberbullying. But ironically, a major sign someone is a troll is that they post anonymously.

Anyhoo.

• Why is there a universal trend with certain diphthongs getting distorted a certain way? For instance, in Sanskrit and Hindi, "a+u" is pronounced "o" rather than "au", and "a+i" is "e" rather than "ai". That should sound familiar, because that's the diphthongs in French (the ai->e also happened in Vulgate Latin, and ae also began to be pronounced like e).
  
  What's really weird is that the ai->e trend happens in Japanese and Korean, too. The stereotypical coarse accent in Japanese does it, and the vowel in Korean currently Romanized as "ae" began as a diphthong of a+i.
  
  Is it maybe just a convenience thing? E is between a and i, and o between a and u, so maybe people just say "Switching from one to the other is hard, I'll just say the thing in the middle." And diphthongs are hard, try saying any diphthong your language hasn't got (like öü, for instance).


• Trigun, I realize, is the only not-shit post-scarcity SF. The Plants, after all, are the means their civilization uses to become that way (the reason they're such a limited resource is that their ships crashed)—and, as might've been expected, they're powered by a forsaken child. One of whom wants to get even.
  
  And, because Nightow may have the expectations of an eight-year-old but he's not a moron, even Plants wear out.


• Why do SF novels try to reinvent the wheel? If the setting is far, far in the future, I can see having a conlang, or having humans dominated by a markedly different language (what if 32nd century Earth uses Bengali the way it now uses English?), but not if it's only 500 or so years in the future.
  
  In my books, the aliens who wish to communicate with humans learn English, French, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, and/or Arabic. Those, after all, are the official languages of the UN, which, remember, is much more of a world-state than it is now (though still a confederation). They, with the possible addition of Hindi (which might, depending on the future political situation, be substituted for Russian) would also likely be the official languages of a conceivable world-state for the remotely tenable future. Or, well, Hindustani, which (lots of idiots' protestations to the contrary) is the term for the "neutralized" version of Hindi-Urdu that Indian films are often made in.


• You know how the Brutes call you "bastard" in Halo 3, as in "There's the bastard, kill him!"? Well, I wonder, does "bastard" mean "illegitimate" in their language? The Covenant being eugenicist, I wonder if the word being rendered "bastard" actually means "eugenically counterindicated"?
  
  I can't get behind that one "Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina" story about the Devaronian dude, and how they use "cold food" as profanity. But I can easily conceive of a predatory species that uses "carrion" the way we use "crap". Similarly, since my felinoids are incapable of tasting sweet, their equivalent of "saccharine" or "cloying" is "liver-meat". They also use "tender" where we use "sweet", I think I mentioned before. (They, by the way, do not use carrion that way, although "scavenger" is a cussword, since scavenging is one of their taboos.)


• Did you know China has a version of shiritori (take the end, the Japanese word-game)? Yeah, I heard about it from someone (Taiwanese?) on a Korean-language forum I used to go to that no longer exists. Apparently it uses the hanzi, rather than kana. I imagine its only lose-condition is not being able to come up with a word.
  
  I seem to recall Korean had one, too, but I don't remember how it worked. I think "if a word ends with 'ng' the next word has to start with a vowel, and the loser is the first to use a word that ends with a vowel" would make sense, but that might not be workable.


• I decided recently that my felinoids' craft sodalities ("guilds") would have symbols. I know the Signalers' Sodality, who make the computer networks, use a heliograph and two crossed torches, the former for heliograph signaling, the latter for lighting beacons.
  
  I wonder, how do you symbolize medicine, weapon-making, or architecture? Doctors wear orange (I had had them wear fuchsia, the color of their blood, but that's what the soldiers wear; now they wear orange, the color of bone), but I'm not sure what to have as their symbol. I think most of their "guilds" use the craft's tools or products as a symbol, but which medical tools? I think maybe scalpels (which may not have quite the same design as ours), and maybe bowls? They don't drink out of cups, and their medics were also apothecaries (I think I mentioned before, their "guild" system is a lumper, while ours was a splitter).


• I know I harp endlessly on this, but is it really possible that nobody explained to Joss that Chinese profanity is mainly concerned with death and the naughty bits, not God or any other religious appurtenances? Cantonese (whose profanity I know better than Mandarin) has an F-word (diú), but other than that, the four other "words you can't say on TV" mean the genitals (gàu, lán, and chaht mean the male one, hài means the female).
  
  And other than that, Cantonese swearing involves death: séi means death or die (roughly the equivalent of "damn", e.g. séigwáilóu "damn whitey"), pùkgàai means "drop dead in the street", and hahmgàacháan means "death of a whole family".
  
  Again, there's something fundamentally arrogant about not bothering to look up how you actually swear in a language, just because you're so impressed with your own "wit". Especially when you also don't have any of that language's speakers in your cast (apparently Joss claims none of the Asians who auditioned were cute enough—which is probably perjury, East Asia has been aggressively selecting for "cuteness" in women for, oh, 500 years at least).


• I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a brony, but I am very impressed with "My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic". I mention it here because the characters, being quadrupeds, usually "clap" by stomping. Which is a nice cultural-setting detail.
  
  The fact it and Adventure Time, two well-done fantasy shows, are on at the same time is probably a sign of the end-times.