Language and Music

Alright, these suggestions only fit pseudo-terran style societies.

Now, language is very different from the sounds our creatures will generally make pre-sapience, so we'll have to have a different set for that.

Now, languages would be made as gibberish, but each with a very clear style, after which the language would be named. Examples: Mesoamerican, Slavic, Romantic, Germanic, Semetic, etc. For each of these we would need, say, 10-20 different sets of voices to keep it from feeling like we're dealing with clones. Each voice set will contain tons of lines so that hopefully, the immersion feels slightly better than in Spore by giving a wider range of emotions.

Languages will overlap as cultures come into contact with each other, and so are not defined by nation but by culture.

Languages will each have their own randomly selected set of written symbols, either syllabary. logograms, alphabet, or that one that arabic and hebrew fall into that I can never remember the name of. This also constitues how easy it is to learn the written language.

Now, music is a similar beast. As cultures are randomly generated, certain styles of music must be prevalent. Given the differences we'll deal with, I feel music should have certain sets of tags that must be required to have it appear in a culture. Example:

Insturmental Requirements: Voice (Male + Female), Small Tamborine (Hand), Large Plucked Strings, Small Plucked Strings, Medium Harmonic
Language: Slavic
Style: Slavic Traditional

Result: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b1Ci7uAEkc

Then, we would go through and try the same basic thing, adding and removing elements in order to have this still possible if you have other elements or lack a few.

This will take a shitton of work and take up nearly as much space, but I see no other way to implement music well into the game.

Any thought?

P.S. I didn't really know where to put this.... *Blush*

If it's only going to work for species that a) have the same vocal structure as humans, and b) have similar societies, i don't see why it needs to be included. What are we gaining by rewarding the player for making a human-esque species?

US_of_Alaska wrote:

If it's only going to work for species that a) have the same vocal structure as humans, and b) have similar societies, i don't see why it needs to be included. What are we gaining by rewarding the player for making a human-esque species?

I'm not suggesting this be the only way. I'm suggesting this as a way to deal with human-esqe societies. I simply haven't thought of a good way to implement something similar to nonhuman-esqe societies.

Provided we deal with auditory communication, singing is a given. Different non-human styles are always options if we can think of enough lines we can pull out of one type of sound.

In terms of societal similarities: If we're having a tech tree based off of Civ IV's, I fail to see how this is drastically too human.

Language is an organized collection of symbols or sounds that are strung together to create words, at least, that is, in every language we know of (I think). In all the languages we know of sound is made by the human mouth depending on the position of the tongue and the openness of the mouth. Specifically we can have Labial, Dental, Alveolar, Palatal, Velar, Pharyngeal and Glottal sounds (other positions can vary). In the amount of Openness we can have Plosives, Fricatives, Approximates, Semivowels and Vowels (yet again, there are more).

These sounds are strung together based on the Phonological Constraints of the Language: for Japanese it is (C)V(n), Chinese is (C)(i/u)V(w/y/n/ng) and English is as complicated as (s)(C)(r/l/w/y)(V)(C)(C)(C). Further distinctions are made such as Palatization, Velarized and Labialized. Suffixes, Prefixes, Postpositions and Prepositions are added to a word to add further meaning and Grammatical Content.

Every sentence has some form of verb. Verbs are categorized into Tenses (Past, Present, Future, Non-Past, Non-Future or none-at-all), Perfection (whether the verb had been completed by the Agent), Mood (Indicative, Interrogative, Subjunctive or Imperative), Positivity (Positive or Negative), Transitivity (Intransitive, Transitive or Reflexive), Politeness and another category that describes a state or change in one. Verbs may also agree with their Agent or Nominative by Person, Number or both. Active and Passive are big distinctions in a verb and are important in forming new verbs that may not have been present in the Language. such as the verb, to be eaten, from, to eat.

Nouns can use cases such as Nominative, Accusative, Dative, Instrumental, Vocative and Genitive to describe themselves. Number can be represented as simply as none-at-all to English's System or as complex as also having a Dual Number, a Trial Number and even a Quadral Number. The Person of a Noun is the relation of that person to the speaker, 1st person is the person themselves or them and a group. 2nd Person is someone who the speaker is talking to, and 3rd Person is someone who is not present or not part of the discussion (or possibly a rarely-used insult). An Agent is the Noun that is doing the action and another term which I always forget is the Noun with whom the Verb is done to.

Adjectives will often agree with the noun in terms of Case, Number, Plural or, again, none-at-all. The position of Words in a sentence can vary between an absolute requirement to a loose guideline. German and Latin are very loose languages in terms of Word placement because of the large amount of Declension within the Nouns. English is relatively rigid when compared.

The two main nouns in a sentence along with the verb is usually represented by a sequence that looks like this in English: SVO. Other languages also follow this order which represents Subject, Verb, Object. SOV is used by German, Japanese and Latin, VSO is used by Welsh and OVS, VOS, and OSV are used in relatively few languages.


The Orthographies of a language are usually formed by the symbols that came before them. Latin can be traced back to Greek, and to the Phoenicians. Katakana in Japanese is formed from pieces of Kanji (which come from China), the word Katakana means Fragmentary Kana.



All of this could be done in an editor inside the Culture Editor with relatively few hiccups. The Players most probably might not be able to Create Words and their Translations but could define the overall appearance of their language with simple checkboxes. Words would be created on the spot when needed and stored inside a Linguistic File.

Sentences that other races may speak could be created using a Language-Neutral format such as: DEFINITE-Cat-SINGULAR-AGENT-SUBJECT-NOMINATIVE-3RD Eat-PAST-INDICATIVE-POSITIVE-TRANSITIVE-POLITE-PERFECT DEFINITE-Mouse-SINGULAR-???-OBJECT-ACCUSATIVE-3RD.

Most of these Grammatical Distinctions would probably be either Universal or the only ones that we could imagine. The sounds area would most likely be just for Organisms that has some kind of Windpipe and either a tongue or vocal cords. Tones could be used for Organisms without a Windpipe if they had the ability to make tones.

Tenebrarum wrote:

US_of_Alaska wrote:

If it's only going to work for species that a) have the same vocal structure as humans, and b) have similar societies, i don't see why it needs to be included. What are we gaining by rewarding the player for making a human-esque species?

I'm not suggesting this be the only way. I'm suggesting this as a way to deal with human-esqe societies. I simply haven't thought of a good way to implement something similar to nonhuman-esqe societies.

Provided we deal with auditory communication, singing is a given. Different non-human styles are always options if we can think of enough lines we can pull out of one type of sound.

In terms of societal similarities: If we're having a tech tree based off of Civ IV's, I fail to see how this is drastically too human.

Actually... We might be able to pull a fast one on the players. Because, let's face it, they're not going to recognize language patterns if their species uses a different vocal structure. So we can just use your solution to human-esque and randomize the non-human languages.

Okay, you've convinced me.

We can't say that every language will have thgose rules. In english I can say "I eat grapes" While in spanish i can say "Como uvas" and mean the same thing. Notice the difference between the number of words. and that's an extremely simple sentence. My point there is that we don't need any sort of grammatical rules in our languages, since grammatical rules for languages get pulled out of someone's Belgium in the first place.

~sciocont wrote:

We can't say that every language will have thgose rules. In english I can say "I eat grapes" While in spanish i can say "Como uvas" and mean the same thing. Notice the difference between the number of words. and that's an extremely simple sentence. My point there is that we don't need any sort of grammatical rules in our languages, since grammatical rules for languages get pulled out of someone's Belgium in the first place.

Hence the way I say in the OP: it will be gibberish. We don't need to have a system to create language in the game: no one will be learning it.

In fact, trying that would be detrimental: we'd need to create sound files for every possible language and as they got mixed it would still end up sounding REALLY weird.

Gibberish allows people to notice certain patterns, but doesn't require anything more than that.

Also, does anyone have any issues with the music part of this?

Tenebrarum wrote:

~sciocont wrote:

We can't say that every language will have thgose rules. In english I can say "I eat grapes" While in spanish i can say "Como uvas" and mean the same thing. Notice the difference between the number of words. and that's an extremely simple sentence. My point there is that we don't need any sort of grammatical rules in our languages, since grammatical rules for languages get pulled out of someone's Belgium in the first place.

Hence the way I say in the OP: it will be gibberish. We don't need to have a system to create language in the game: no one will be learning it.

In fact, trying that would be detrimental: we'd need to create sound files for every possible language and as they got mixed it would still end up sounding REALLY weird.

Gibberish allows people to notice certain patterns, but doesn't require anything more than that.

Also, does anyone have any issues with the music part of this?

I don't really think the music is necessary. It is much less important than the language.

~sciocont wrote:

I don't really think the music is necessary. It is much less important than the language.

In some ways. In other ways it's more important: To establish common ground with races you don't share language with for example.

I'm not suggest an unreasonable amount of music, but some control, and something better than Spore would be nice.

Hopefully we can set this up to allow people to add music themselves when they want.