Dragaera

Culture and Languages

Thu Nov 11 11:14:45 PST 2004

Mark A Mandel wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 29 Oct 2004, Philip Hart wrote:
> 
> #Mark is responsible for the problems in the other living languages.
> 
> And those not yet born, such as Klingon.


As long as this has gotten onto languages - a question I've been
wondering about.  Some of the Dragaeran Houses have different languages
than standard Dragaeran (like Adrilankha means something in Orca,
IIRC).  So, assuming Dragaeran and human language acquisition skills are
fairly similar, can you extrapolate off that?

Like, could it mean the humans the Jenoine made Dragaerans from came
>from a lot of different cultures, and maybe the Jenoine, being aliens,
were trying to figure out which genes coded for the various traits the
different cultural groups are stereotypically supposed to have? (This
would assume that the animal genes are just easy gene trackers, rather
than determinative, of course).

Or would it make more sense to assume that the original Dragaerans all
spoke one language, but there was a long period between the original
Houses getting out of the labs and the formation of Kieron's empire, so
the languages mutated so that each House spoke a language that didn't
obviously resemble each others?  In this case - how many generations
would you need before that would happen?

Or could it just mean that some of the Houses wanted a secret language
they could communicate in amongst themselves, and developed one, while
others didn't care?  Would the RL use of Klingon, frex, show that this
is certainly a good possibility, or does Klingon use show more that
given a big enough population, 1% of all people can be a fairly large
percentage, but a small group isn't likely to do anything like that?

Karen