#my final wish: szarekh wasn't even the one to make the language unification mandate. it was one of his predecessors

[metashard]

Linguistic Features I Think Would Be Rad/Horrible for the Necrontyr to Have

- Korean honorific system (bake respect into everything including verb conjugation)

- Formality is also shown often through word choice (e.g. "thing" vs. "item")

- And through codified body language - bows, salutes, gestures. And by where your eyes are pointing. And now by the intensity and pattern of your body's node lights. If you screw any of this up, you will start a five hundred year long blood feud, good luck

- Egyptian determinatives (tone tags and emojis all in one)

- Glyphic writing and character-by-character writing are completely different systems that have no correlation

- Glyphic and calligraphic styles are also completely different systems with no correlation. If you know both, you're either a nerd or a cryptek

- Highly polysynthetic. Big compound words. The proper translation of "gauss cannon" would be closer to "carryable straight distance middle spectrum magnetic anti stability beam launching weapon," to use the cryptek terminology. Which the Immortals abbreviated to "qo-ess," "green light." Which the Imperials transliterated as "gauss."

- Linguistic unification just before biotransference would not fix the accent differences born from languages split across an entire galaxy. Zultanekh should be nearly incomprehensible to Szarekh.

- Linguistic unification did zilch to fix their societal stratification. Imotekh should be nearly incomprehensible to his own court due to speaking with a soldier's dialect. Sure, he can train out of it, but the battlefield doesn't leave time for flowery language.

- Linguistic unification did zilch to fix the kind of person Trazyn is. If the language was supposed to be some reconstructed "common ancestral tongue," you can bet he'd speak the reconstruction version he personally finds the most accurate.

- Imperial humans who try learning the language from tomb carvings sound incredibly stilted and, somehow, too formal to a natural speaker. This is sometimes itself taken as mockery. Five hundred years blood feud upon ye.

- Nearly 200 phonemes. All the Egyptian, all the English, add Welsh and Nahuatl in there to cover Llandu'gor and Khatlan. Add space noises and robot buzzing now for good measure.

- The character writing system has 31 characters to cover these nearly 200 phonemes. Welcome to English, hope you like the taste of ghoti.

- The glyphic writing system has over 3000 characters to memorize. Not including diacritics.

- The calligraphic writing system is supposedly so graceful that a skilled poet can write an entire stanza with one figure. Zahndrekh is not a skilled poet. His works aren't just bad poetry, they're sprawling spaghetti that occasionally scribbles off into neighboring pages.

- Informal singing is done in whatever tongue you like. Formal singing, things like religious or fine art performances, are done in a melismatic language specifically reserved for the arts. This language is nearly dead in the 41st millennium except for, once again, Trazyn being a knowledge-hoarding freak.