- Dec 11, 2020
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I would imagine that the situation is that each of the ethnic communities have their own original language that they use at home with English acting as the lingua franca. At least in theory. In practice however , due to centuries of intermingling both back on Earth and planetside the different languages have become heavily influenced by one another both in terms of loanwords and grammar changes.So you end up with something like the language spoken by Anime nerds that has Japanese words thrown in.1. Languages and names. What languages are spoken on Raana? Several Japanese loanwords said by Aiko (and Russian, by Nika) and the way the caravaneer speaks suggest that English (or, rather, 25th century English with some translation conventions applied) is indeed spoken in Ikaanos (the default assumption), but other languages are spoken as well.
If so, the question is, where do the names like Raana, Ikaanos, Haalu come from? They sound quite unusual and while they are certainly "cool" when you just start playing (and easy to Google which is also a plus), in-universe, one starts to wonder about their origin. If it were just the planet name, that would be fine, the planet could have been named by an astronomer using any number of mythological or other obscure origins. But those double-As throughout several names look like they are names in a non-English, perhaps local language, but who are those "locals"? they can't be the monkeys, right? or can they?
Also, what language(s) are spoken by the tribals? Words like "tuwa"—are they in their language? Was it a language that evolved among the First Wavers? What Earth language(s) did it descend from?
And that's before we figure in the natural evolution of language in general. This game is after all set in the 2500s. If we go back 500 years people were still speaking Middle English.
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