[ SECRET POST #2946 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2946 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.


__________________________________________________



10.














Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 038 secrets from Secret Submission Post #421.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[lb_lee]

This is fascinating to me, because I had a similar linguistics headache with one of my series. (The language the characters speak has basically three sets of pronouns: I/we, you/y'all, it/they, and often whether it's singular or plural is skipped.) I ended up even having to make a meta post on it, explaining that I was often inserting gender, because using 'it' all the time would come off as UBER-dehumanizing and creepy, depending on what was going on in the story.

Fictional translation woes, man.

--Rogan

[cbrachyrhynchos]

I hear you. I had similar problems trying to write with different degrees of formal, something that modern English distinctly lacks.

[lb_lee]

Uuuugh, no kidding. At least I was able to work around that by using titles and such. (The more douchey the customer gets, the more elaborate your titles get for them!) Still, it doesn't compare to something like Japanese, where you can slice someone's to ribbons just by conjugating your verbs different.

--Rogan

[ketita]

That was one of the reasons that in the comic I'm working on we decided to use real-world languages (and even made up a reason for many of the characters to speak English between themselves), to avoid too much translation.
Conlangs are so cool, though. It was very difficult for me to resist the temptation to make ALL the conlangs.

[lb_lee]

Yeah, in my case, there wasn't any other option; it was a land with no native mammals, and no other humans at all, and the whole point of the setting was to show different cultural, linguistic, and social norms. Them using English would've broken the setting.

I haven't actually MADE the language and probably never will, because uuuuugh, sign language with different dialects based on how many limbs you have? It'd SUCK. Most of the time, it works out fine.

[ketita]

Okay yeah, it doesn't look like you'd manage to avoid "translation" in this case. That's really cool, though.
...are you sure you aren't at least a teeeeeeeeny bit tempted to work out some of that language? :3
Our story also has a bunch of different cultures, but since we're using existing languages we made up an in-universe reason to explain English being the lingua franca there.

[lb_lee]

*laughs* Only slightly. I'd have to work out the anatomy of most the salient species first, since form follows function, and THEN build the sign language off of that. And unfortunately, sign language is not something I know much about. (I studied Japanese instead. No regrets, but DEFINITELY not sign language.)

--Rogan