Languages

[TheGSE]

The Common Languages

1. High Common (rainbow): The upper-class, literary common rainbow tongue taught by teachers to noble and rich students. Old fashioned, unnecessarily complex grammar and pronunciation. Words change depending on context, speaker, and intent. Numbers change depending on what is being counted. Elaborate written tradition.

2. Vulgar Common (rainbow): The trade lingua of the non-noble middle-classes and professionals of the Rainbow Lands, with distinct regional dialects. Only written for trade. Influenced by outer languages. Similar to ‘City Speak’ or ‘Gutter Talk.’

3. Purple Speech (rainbow): The dialects of the peasants and laborers of the Purple Land, with many borrowings from the steppe folk. Mostly oral, no written tradition. Very similar to Bluenttalk, but it’s an insult to say so.

4. Bluenttalk (rainbow): The harsh and uncouth dialects of the exiles from the Blue Land and the wild folk still living there. Any writing has been suppressed long ago. Possesses a surprisingly detailed vocabulary of dairy products and aquatic vegetables. Borrowings from Blue Tongue.

5. Greenspeak (rainbow): The peasant and forester dialects of the Greenland. No written tradition. Large vocabulary corpus. Speakers from different dialects can mostly understand each others’ words, even if just by context.

6. Emerald Common (rainbow): The vulgar lingua franca of Metropolis, the Emerald City, with many Elfish and Greenspeak borrowings. Developing a broad, popular written corpus. Beautiful traditional handwriting.

7. Decapolitical (rainbow): The vulgar dialects of the Sea Fingers and the Decapolis, also popular with sailors. Written for trade purposes. Very onomatopoeic. Short, simple words. Understatement is prized. Silence is golden.

8. Saffranian (rainbow): the vulgar speech of Safranj and the Yellow Land, now also adopted by the local oligarchs. Extensive written traditions. A more refined and rhyming variant of Decapolitical, popular in the opera.

9. Caravanian (rainbow): The trade tongue of the caravans in the Yellow Waste and of some nomad tribes there. Mercantile written tradition. Borrows from many languages. Speakers can bend the language to adapt it for speakers of a certain language, or make it indecipherable to anyone but other Caravanian speakers.

10. Oranjetic (rainbow): The vulgar dialects of the Orange Land, very similar to Saffranian. Paltry written tradition. A musical dialect, exquisite in song.

11. Free Circle Kriol (rainbow creole): The wonderfully rhymed disyllabic speech of the Circle Sea free families (pirates) and river-travelers. No written tradition and vast variation among dialects prompting some scholars to say it is not so much a language as a mass outbreak of glossolalia.

12. Redland District Cant (rainbow creole): The badly rhyming vulgar speech of the autonomous enclave that is the Red Land District. Vast written tradition, but mostly political tracts. Large influence of Decapolitical through trade. Lots of swearing.

13. Red Tongue (rainbow): The vulgar dialects of the Red Land with many dwarven elements admixed. Poor written tradition. Heavily influenced by the slurred speech of the long-reigning Grand Red Duke Moshle IV, the Red Tongue replaces ‘s’ sounds with ‘sh’ and runs words together, as after too much wine.

14. Winerian (dwarven): The hill dialects of the Vintner Dwarves of the Red Land and Orange Land. Little writing, and what there is, quite literalist. Heavily influenced by the Red Tongue, Winerian is the most linear of the dwarven dialect.

15. Volkan (dwarven): The mountain dialects of the Mountains of Light and the Black Gold. Vast written corpus. When written, the space between the characters has as much meaning as the characters themselves. Much is lost by speaking it. Lots of silences and isolated consonants. It is best spoken indoors or in echoing caves. The echo is part of the language. It sounds very strange outdoors as parts of the words are missing.

16. Woodlander (elven): The language found inscribed on trees and rocks in the Elvenwood, spoken by some of the tribes there. Isolated inscriptions. The language is structured to change meaning with the seasons and the phases of the moon as though it does not quite belong on the solid earth.

17. Steppe Speeches (steppe, rainbow): The various dialects of the Ultraviolet Grasslands grew from a patois of rainbow dialects and Steppeland trade tongues. Its written tradition is uncertain. Posseses an immense vocabulary for grazing creatures and mechanical engineering.

18. Sunsettish (steppe): The common trade language of western Steppelanders. Written by merchants. Surprisingly focused on spirits and spirit possession.

19. White Line (steppe): The cryptic language of the Porcelain Princes was once more widespread, now it has been reduced to their outposts and trading missions. Vast dusty libraries exist. Because it has extensively evolved to suit the polybody structure, some of the more refined forms of the language require multiple synchronized voices used in unison to convey meaning properly.

20. Satrap Canto (steppe?): The color and light-adapted language of the Spectrum Satraps seems to be an outlying dialect of some larger language group or system. Its writing traditions are polychromatic and use both color and sound to convey meaning. Without light-generating organs or a rainbow translation array, this language is practically unusable by baseline humans.

[TheGSE]

The Dead and Weird Languages

1. Black City Alphabet (?): Found inscribed on some metal sheets brought from the mythical Black City in the west. Some academics say it’s not a language, just intricate patterns. Faraway people joke that the writings are really the schemas for a very complicated dance.

2. Cat Thought (cat): Thought-speech of the Violet City cats, which can best be described as a formalized logical structure used to enable empathetic coordination between cats and telepathic communication with their thralls.

3. Deep Dwarven (dwarven): The hidden priestly language of the Deep Dwarves that is not spoken, only carved in stones and bones. It can be written in any direction, even constructing beautiful figures with the characters. Very succinct. Some carvings are considered visual poetry. A subset of Deep Dwarven is Deep Dwarven Hexadecimal, used for programming Dwarven prayer machines.

4. Blue Tongue (isolate): The forgotten speech of the Blue God, now used by some secretive cults and mad wizards. A forbidden, written corpus exists. It is harsh, logical, iconographic, and ambiguous by nature.

5. Elven (elven): A hypothetical Elven language, reconstructed by sages from common elements of Woodlander and Moonlander. Some scholars associate it with the Vile Ones of Long Long Ago. They surmise that a written version existed, though aside from possible decorative stelae, no examples have been found.

6. Moonlander (elven?): An extinct (?) language found inscribed in tombs in the Mountains of the Moon. Samples of the writing have been found to be memetic worms, taking over the reader’s mind and driving them to perform odd, incomprehensible tasks. Though usually not deadly, permanent personality changes and madness have been noted often enough that in the popular imagination reading Moonlander is associated with lunacy.

7. Marmotsk (isolate): The language of the Marmotfolk requires large incisors and musky pheromones to use correctly. The delicately whorled bone-script is more accessible to outsiders.

8. Umber (steppe): Dead language of Fallen Umber, characterized by delicate poetry and three-dimensional writing on woven, living chitin. Heavily influenced by another missing isolate.

9. Lingish (lingish): Obscure dead language, hypothesized from references in old libraries, toponyms in modern languages, and some fossilized Oranjetic expressions. It seems to have been a fluid, contextual and permutative language designed to overwrite human brains and prevent personality reprogramming and remote sensing.

10. Great Language (lingish?): The hyper-contextual and agglutinative dialects (languages?) of the Great Folk communities in the vicinity of the Behemoth shell. Individual communities’ dialects are so divergent that mutual incomprehension is common.

11. Trilignic (lingish? steppe?): The ancient languages of the Three Sticks civilization, before its decline. Found on countless inscriptions, buildings, and screens. Not fully reconstructed, but seems focused on overcoming hedonic limitations. Modern inhabitants of the region use Sunsettish day to day.

12. Vomish (?): A hypothetical machine hive language used by vomes. Perhaps a whole series of languages. Many scholars dispute that vomes are not even sentient. Likely utilizes electromagnetic radiation to convey meaning.

13. White City Pictographic (?): Hypothetical original language of civilized trading nexus beyond the Yellow Waste. Known from decorations and vidy crystal recordings brought to Safranj by adventurers and merchants.

14. High Ultra (?): Psychemorphic language of the body-hopping ultras, it produces profound psychedelic dislocation in embodied sentiences. It seems to lack temporal structure and appears to be physically unwritable, or rather, it can only be written by rewriting psychic structures or memories. Profoundly alien, it has been recovered from some crystals. Some scholars speculate that this is not actually a language but the substrate of the ultra’s existence—in effect, their bodies.