OpenGeofiction
This was discussed in the wiki but I was thinking if we could create a language group spanning Kojo, Hoppon, Belphenia and Paxtar based on the Hopponese, Nihonish and Kojolese languages. If possible we could create a birthplace for these languages if the surrounding users were okay with it, in Wiwaxia or Ataraxia also Wiwaxia, Ataraxia and Pasundan-Padjadjaran could have ethnic minorities who spoke a Pseudo-Japanese language.
I hope by creating this user diary we could create a name for this language group and establish a region were the “Proto-people” or pioneers of the original language lived. I wouldn’t want to put limits on any of my neighbors but would like if they could help with the possible formation of such a region into their early histories. Any country who wants to be included and is near the region feel free to add your own language. In fact you could be on another continent like Paxtar and can add to the language group. I don’t want to restrict anyone and just want to make a history.
For names I already have a few. Axian Language Group (Axian Peninsula)
Palian Language Group (Sound of Pa)
“Unnamed Peninsula” Language Group (Peninsula were Kojo, Belphenia, Orinoco, Xerneas and Hoppon are located on, the larger peninsula that the Axian Peninsula spurns from)
Paxian Language Group (Sound of Pa+ Axian Peninsula)
Soulethan Language Group (Southern Uletha although it is in SE Uletha)
Discussion
Comment from Leowezy on 8 March 2016 at 17:54
I love this idea! I personally prefer Axian Language Group, but that might just me personal taste.
I’d just like to remark that modern Kojolese is supposed to be a fully developed Creole language that incorporates many elements from Hopponese into a Pyilser frame; Pyilser is supposed to be an old, isolate language with origin around Pyingshum. So how would Kojolese be classified? Like a “Junior member” of the Axian language group? Or rather it’s own group with reference to strong influences from the Axian language group?
Comment from Portopolis on 8 March 2016 at 18:19
It could be classified as the same Language Family but under a different Language Branch. BTW a Language Family would be Indo-European Language Family or Niger-Congo Language Family. A Language Branch would be like Turkic,Romance, Indo-Iranian and Germanic Language Branches all under the Indo-European Family. Then their would be German, Dutch and English language under that family. It depends how isolated you want Pyilser, It could have it’s own Family or have it’s own Branch.
Comment from Leowezy on 8 March 2016 at 18:33
So, would the “Axian Language Group” be a language family like IE or “just” a language branch of an even larger, continental family? I’d suggest it to be a whole family, but I’m not sure how you ment it in your diary ;)
Comment from _zM on 8 March 2016 at 18:57
That got me thinking about other language groups and how they might fit. Right now it seems like that even though Pretany is supposed to be the “source” of Franquese, there are a lot of French speaking countries around S Tarephia (around that sea between TA and AN). Why and how that happened might be interesting to figure out as well.
Comment from Portopolis on 8 March 2016 at 20:02
It would be a family not a branch. Sorry for not specifying.
Comment from Portopolis on 8 March 2016 at 20:29
_zM I think Pretany is a good country for Franquese simply because it has 100+ million people and the fact that it is in “Europe” A.K.A NW Uletha. So explaining how it relates to Ingerish and the other nations is quite easy. I also agree with you,maybe Pretany has a colonial history in that region?
Comment from Demuth on 8 March 2016 at 20:53
Wiwaxian history as it stands is that the original inhabitants of Wiwaxia were the Edicarians, an ethnic group closely related to the Djadjarics and Sundanics who live in Pasundan-Padjadjaran. They were a much smaller group, isolated from Pasundan-Padjadjaran, and after a 150 years or so of colonization, were wiped out by disease (darmer fever) more or less, although the current population of Wiwaxia has some traces. It’s also the origin of the Wiwaxian matriarchical society.
Djadjaric and Sundanic are equivalents to Indonesian languages I would guess - but Okiazr is really the one to ask as he is the owner.
So, in short, Wiwaxia is probably not the best place to source the group.
But a question - is there any way to connect Pasundan-Padjadjaran with this, as they are not colonizers but original inhabitants of the region…? They don’t have to be of course, but to throw out an idea, anyone, Kojo or Hoppon for instance, interested in throwing in Djadjaric and Sundanic influences into their languages? It would make sense geographically!
Comment from Leowezy on 8 March 2016 at 21:14
@Demuth, for my part I will probably never construct Kojolese to the point where one could consider it that far developed that one could trace small influences from other languages; I create Kojolese mostly for the sake of naming places and maybe form some simple sentences here and there. So, of course I could write something on the wiki like “Kojolese shares a common background with Djadjaric and Sundanic which can be seen in a number of common root words”, but in fact it wouldn’t be practical to actually construct these connections.
As for Kojolese, again I source some words (which I don’t keep track of…) from Japanese and Armenian, which I then adapt to Kojolese phonology. The words I vaguely source from google translate Armenian are supposed to represent the Pyilser part in Kojolese, which I consciously won’t develop as a separate language to leave some creative clearance in regards to Kojolese itself. Some very basic ideas of the grammar (like particles etc.) are influenced by Japanese (=Hopponese?), and the general sounds are pretty much equivalent to the Japanese phonology as well, just with a much wider range of possible syllables.
So, if at all, this Axian language family could only be a big umbrella for all languages in OGF that are somewhat related to Japanese/Hopponese/Nihonish etc. From what I saw about the (very nice) Paxlinga, I’m not sure whether it would seem right to include it in this family, since its Vocabulary is a mix of primarily Catanese and Brunich based words. Ingerish, Nihonish and Tenebri words are also evident, but less common.
To end this, I think the more (different) languages we add to such a language group the more unrealistic it would be. Let’s first have a look at what languages are actually related (judging from their grammar and vocab). and then figure out how to geographically find a nice explanation for their origin and spread :)
Comment from Luciano on 9 March 2016 at 00:35
The problem I have with this discussion is that we can’t really have a “pseudo-Japanese” without also figuring out our “pseudo-Chinese”, “pseudo-Korean” etc. This is called the “Sinosphere” on earth - the broad outlines of the Chinese-focused civilization of East Asia. Although in narrow linguistic terms Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are not directly related languages, they have deeply influenced one another. Historically, more than 50% of Korean vocabulary is Chinese in origin (similar to the way 50% of English vocabulary comes from Latin and Greek). Japanese isn’t quite as high, but it’s close. Not only that, but in the more modern era, the influence has run the other way. As the Japanese were first to “modernize” during the Meiji era, they were the first in East Asia to coin vocabulary for many scientific concepts, which they did using their borrowed Chinese vocabulary. The Koreans and Chinese re-borrowed these new scientific words. Most modern Mandarin scientific vocabulary are from Japan - but written (as in Japan) with Chinese characters.
Furthermore, if you go farther back in time, Chinese was built by huge periods of borrowings from Sanskrit (!) in India. This influence was due to Buddhism. And Indian Buddhist vocabulary was influenced by Greek (!) due to the adventures of Alexander the Great into India in 300BC. Thus to really, sincerely, work out how our “alternate world” Japanese arose, we need to know where the Chinese and Koreans were. And for the Chinese, we need to know where India is. And for India, we need to know where Greece is. We have to trace out linguistic geography: how did a word/concept like “value, merit” make this complex linguistic journey.. Greek ἀλφή [alphe] -> Sanskirt अर्हत् [arhat] -> Pali අරහත් [arahant] -> Chinese 羅漢 [luóhàn] -> Korean 羅漢 [nahan] -> Japanese 羅漢 [rakan].
We can’t build an alternate world of linguistics without working out how all these pieces fit together.
I think I’m fighting a losing battle here, but we can’t just plonk down languages where we want and say: “here is Japanese, there is French.” Modern Japanese is the sum total of its history, which is essentially a language evolving in a geographic space with neighbors influencing it. If Japan had been between Indonesia and France in an alternate universe, then modern Japanese would look quite different, I think.
Comment from Egen on 9 March 2016 at 04:25
I originally did not give much thought to my language selections, or to anything outside my territory. I am guessing many others did the same, leading the the current patchwork of languages we have in OGF.
I think my retroactive explanation for Spanish, German and English being used in Paxtar is okay, but I have not been able to come up with a plausible reason for how something related to Japanese ended up on the other side of the globe from the other two places where it is used. So far I have dealt with the problem by trying to ignore it, and hoping things will resolve themselves with time.
Perhaps if the new continents have some type of basic structure/plan/guidance before they are turned loose, that would be where a Sinosphere (thank you Luciano) analog of some sort could be located. Early Sinospherian Vikings spreading their language to southwestern Antarephia would solve my problem!
Or should there be more direction/pressure to try to bring our existing language map in to a more realistic form? I would consider abandoning Nihonish/Japanese and Tenebri/Latin, but am now fairly invested in Spanish and German being the basis of Paxlinga. Others are probably also invested in their language choices, which would make changing painful.
There does not seem to be an easy or clear way to make the language distribution we currently have make sense.
Comment from Luciano on 9 March 2016 at 04:42
I want to be clear, I understand Paxtar’s point. My language choices in Ardisphere (namely, Spanish, Korean, English, Welsh, and others) came before I had any idea of coordinating with the rest of the world. By making it all fairly recent and immigrant-driven, I essentially “retconned” the situation to adapt to the OGF-world.
Among the admin team, we’ve discussed the idea of, as Paxtar says, “some type of basic structure/plan.guidance before they are turned loose” for the new continents. That’s partly why they haven’t been turned loose. I have been fighting for one of the new continents to be dedicated to an “East, South and Southeast Asian” cultural constraint, but since these are not popular choices for mappers, it might be an unrealistic constraint, I’m not sure. I’m hoping that will be the “home” for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Prakrit, Khmer, Dravidian and other earth-analog languages.
One thought for the “how languages got to my country” question: given the higher proportion of land area in OGF-world, it is possible there was much more maritime contact in the pre-modern era between continents and cultures. Perhaps some Japanese (nihonish) explorers ended up in Paxtar in some pre-modern point in time. Likewise for Hoppon. We can plausibly move the contact-dates back much more easily than we can plausibly rearrange the language homelands map.
Anyway, to the extent we want to be “open” (“OPENgeofiction”!) and accommodate as diverse a group as users as we can, placing language homeland constraints may violate the spirit of our community. There has already been substantial pushback in several instances. We may be better off just “ignoring the problem”. We have multiple homelands for many languages: the unified origins we’ve worked out for Castellanese and Ingerish are the exceptions right now, rather than typical, and perhaps those exceptions were ultimately possible only because they were worked out relatively early, leaving later arrivals no choice but to jump on board.
Comment from Leowezy on 9 March 2016 at 14:14
@Luciano, @Paxtar Hmm I see; probably we’ll just have to accept that there will always be some incompletenesses and incoherences. But since Luciano brought up the “new” continents; would it be feasible to think about (of course voluntarily) relocate some countries to there? For example, I could imagine myself very well relocating Kojo to the new continent and form this aforementioned “Sinosphere” with other Chinese or Japanese influenced nations (this would also be a good way to solve some climate issues etc ;).
It would be interesting to know what the approximate “node limit” for these kind of moves is; I think you Luciano have moved a country before, could you say a few words about whether that’s even technically possible?
Comment from Portopolis on 9 March 2016 at 14:30
I could try moving my nation to this “Sinosphere” , but as someoen wo doesn’t own a computer that can run JOSM, that seems quite impossible. I haven’t done much mapping yet but I would love to. Having a “Sinosphere” would be interesting but I would want my nation or the nations to not have a real world equivalent. That is why although I have “Japanese as my language”, besides the strong Isolationist vibes and large megalopoli Hoppon is nothing like Japan modern day. I also plan to move my nation continually away from East Asian culture into my own “Hopponese Culture”, just like Lallemand has no real world substitute, although South Africa is a close similarity. I want Hoppon to be more like Belphenia which is so unique it has guilds still even though most nations have either “outlawed” guilds or they have faded away.
Comment from Easky30 on 9 March 2016 at 15:31
So far I have not really put much effort into a language for Orinoco. I make my edits in English and use a lot of made up names mixed up with some Gaelic & Native American names borrowed from what’s around me here in Long Island, NY. What the real Orinocan Language and alphabet look like is whatever the viewer wants it to be, with that said I have no problem having the language of Orinoco falling in line with what my neighbors see as common language. Maybe it could be possible that all the new continents are really the old world, this could explain for all the various languages and cultures spread out randomly in the current world.
Comment from Demuth on 9 March 2016 at 19:56
Intriguing thought, @Easky30! And of course you have a little bit of Østermarkish influence on your far northern islands, don’t forget!
I have to say, I retconned Wiwaxia’s history also - I built much of the country and named it before I thought about how it related to its surroundings, so it by default became an Ingerish colony.
And even if I’ve thought through Østermark much more, it still really is kind of unlikely that whalers from thousands and thousands of kilometers away in Scandmark would have somehow ended up on the other side of a huge continent. I’m thinking about having them come through the northern edge of the, uh, new world instead, although even that is a bit far-fetched.
A question that somehow I think @Luciano knows the answer to: Are the southeast Asian languages - Thai, Talagog, Vietnamese, Bahasa Malay, Balinese etc related? And what, if any, is there relationship to the Sinosphere? Can that help us in thinking about Pasundan-Padjadjaran and how it fits - or not - with Nihonish/Hopponese/Kojolese…?
Comment from Easky30 on 9 March 2016 at 22:09
@Demuth I have not forgotten the Østermarkish influence in the Aulander Islands and the northeast. I have always looked at fictional mapping as what would it look like if I picked up a street atlas of an unknown or imaginary city place so the language and other real world aspects in OGF are new and interesting for me.
Comment from UnSoiDisantOracle on 9 March 2016 at 23:49
I was playing around with a few languages in Ataraxia at first. I could think about another language supplanting Spanish to the east of Ataraxia City to the Kojo border (3 provinces: Delmar, Diego Garcia, Reino Oriental). This could be a Kojolese-dialect or another related language. Of course being close to a crossroads in this part of Uletha, Ataraxia should have a number of minority and ethnic groups. But I am not sure how feasible it is to have another language family’s birthplace in Ataraxia.
Related but maybe not the place - I am rather attached to the Ataraxian language at this point and the timeline history I created. Ataraxia developed through a federation/unification process starting from the 1200’s, and the Ataraxian language was already present then without ‘European/NW Ulethan’ colonization. If Ataraxian language needs to have spread from elsewhere earlier - over say a land trade route - then that’s fine. Don’t mean to be the intransigent one.
Comment from okiazr on 11 March 2016 at 00:50
@demuth, yes sundanic and djadjaric languages equivalent to local languages in indonesia, particulary in java island. Sundanic languages refer to sundanese language, use by people in western part of java island, while Djadjaric language in the real world refer to javanese language, use by people in central and eastern part of java island…
Those two languages closer to sansakrit languages, just like the rest south asian languages than to chinese/korea/japan languages. I dont know how to relate these languages to Nihonish/Hopponese/Kojolese, but this is fictional world, we can make everything closely related while in fact in the real world not related at all
Comment from Luciano on 11 March 2016 at 00:54
@Demuth’s question: there is the Austronesian Language family, which encompasses Bahasa (Indonesian / Malaysian), Tagalog, Balinese, and many others, including surprising relatives such as Hawaiian to the east and Malagasy (Madagascar) to the west). They are all closely and uncontroversially related. There is much controversy, but some linguists include Japanese, however, it is quite different, so perhaps it is an issue of some close language contact around 1000BCE.
Completely unrelated to Austronesian are various “continental” Southeast Asian groups, including Mon-Khmer (Vietnamese, Cambodian, and many others) and Thai-Kadai.
Broadly speaking, whether any of these languages/cultures are included in the Sinosphere has more to do with history than with language-connectedness. Vietnamese is strongly within the Sinosphere, having historically been written using Chinese characters, just like Japanese and Korean. Other areas, such as Singapore, are only within the Sinosphere in the modern era, where the post-British-colonial Chinese diasapora placed roots. Singapore is Chinese only in the same way San Francisco’s Chinatown is Chinese - a consequence of 19th/20th Century migrations.
Culturally, the core Austronesian region and Southeast Asia were more part of the “Hindosphere” than the “Sinosphere” (Vietnam being a kind of intrusive exception down the coast from the north). Before the Islamisation of the Indonesian archipelago in the 15th/16th centuries, the region was predominantly Hindu / Buddhist, and many Buddhist temples remain on Java for example, while Bali has Hindu practitioners into modernity, and Thailand remains almost theocratically Buddhist.
Personally, I think Pasundan-Padjadjaran fits fine where it is - there could be other pseudo-Austronesian languages nearby, or it could be distributed via maritime patterns far and wide (e.g. Hawaii to Madagascar, just like the real world).
But the pre-Modern maritime spread of Austronesian also provides us with an alternate way to understand how other language families might have spread, prior to any “age of discovery,” across the OGF world. Thus, regardless of where we decide the homeland of the in-world “Japan” is, there is nothing wrong with proposing Nihonish mariners settling in e.g. Belphenia, Kojo, Paxtar, etc. Likewise with other language groups.
Comment from Sarepava on 11 March 2016 at 11:51
For what it’s worth, Finnish, which is what Karolian is based on, can sound superficially like Japanese as a lot of the phonemes are similar. And the Finno-Ugric languages did in fact have their origins in Asia. So I wonder if this might help the case of there being an Asian lingosphere in mid-Uletha?