#would Kirin have more or less emotionally charged language because of the Nirik?

[jubileebloom]

5.5 years ago MLP FiM brought back Starswirl the Bearded and now I'm losing my goddamn mind over linguistics

First of all. Five and a half years. Really??? It's been that long???? God I feel really old, and I can't even legally drink round these parts yet. Ponies do things to the brain.

Anyway. On to me ranting about this here unicorn wizard and the weirdness of language instead of doing something useful like studying for finals. He's not even the sole pony to blame for my current descent into madness but he was probably the main catalyst behind it.

I don't know what they did with Starswirl's show appearance that made me drawn to him so immediately—choice of voice actor? design? demeanor? sheer dark magic? who knows—but anyone who knows anything at all about me knows that I've had an on-and-off obsession with this man. It's inescapable. He fundamentally rewired some of my neural connections. Like yes he's a jerk to Twilight and everyone else but that was him at his most stressed and probably at his lowest point because Twilight had just dragged him back to life after he had given himself up to be practically dead to contain the highly dangerous threat that Twilight had just brought back to Equestria but I'm going to keep the psychology lecture to myself for now. I have more important unimportant things to get to.

So. I'm obsessed with Starswirl. And as people sometimes do when they're obsessed with a character, especially one who doesn't come with a lot of canon backstory, they come up with headcanons. And in this MLP managed to do something to me that had never truly been done before to this scale: get me interested in history. Not real history, of course. That would have to wait until later. But the history of Equestria was made keenly relevant, with a new cast of characters ripped right out of the deep past and dropped into the present. We already had Luna and Celestia, of course, but I was more than happy to entertain myself just imagining up sisterly shenanigans rather than dragging myself through a made-up history lecture. I had wondered about their past, but nothing I ever read up about or thought up myself really called to me. Not like the Pillars did.

To make a very long story short, Starswirl ended up doing the thing that characters I like sometimes do. Sometimes I make up headcanons about characters. Other times, it seems that I'll just be thinking about them one day, and suddenly the character in question appears in my mind, but now they have stories, stories that have nothing to do with canon but that they have suddenly brought to me and are now explaining to me in great detail. It's not a conscious choice to write backstories for these characters; they come to live in my subconscious already fairly fleshed out, leaving me to only make a few edits here and there. And now this shortened long story is already getting longer than I wanted, so I will limit myself to only one more sentence. Starswirl was the kind of character who seemed to suddenly come to me with a lot of headcanon backstory, and one piece of that was that my mind seemed to have decided on a whim that he should be fluent in some sort of almost-dead ancient unicorn language.

By this point the title should hopefully be slightly less confusing.

What a marvelous idea, I thought! But ancient, almost-dead unicorn languages are hard to come by these days. So if I wanted to give more weight to this idea, on the off chance I wanted to write a fanfic about it later or something, I'd have to make one myself.

So now I'm dipping my toes into the world of conlangs (constructed languages). In order to invent this language (Archorn, I'm thinking of calling it) I'm going to probably want to find real-life languages to reference in its creation. And if the common language they speak in the show (I'm just calling it Common for simplicity's sake) is similar to English, and if I'm assuming this Archorn language I'm inventing is an ancestor of the common language much like English has roots in many other languages, then I should draw parallels between Archorn and some of the languages that influenced English. Makes sense, right?

Except now I have to figure out what role Archorn would play in influencing Common before I can truly construct it. Or at least, that's what it feels like to me. In reality, I do not have to be doing any of this, I am merely driven to by the demons (hyperfixations) that possess me (are more appealing than my college coursework).

This also leads me to be curious about what other languages might have been used among pegasi or earth ponies. And now I feel like I have to make those up too. I'm gonna be here a while, and that's before I even get into other non-pony species who may have also contributed to the common tongue, and also just having non-pony languages for the sheer sake of having those languages.

So here I am, hours deep into several rabbit holes about linguistics, pushing back my starting line further and further away while I find more prerequisites that I have to fulfill before I feel like I can actually go and make something to quell the thirst for fictitious knowledge in my soul.

Oh, all that wasn't even mentioning that Shadow Play also tried to introduce some bits of Old Ponish. Go figure.

But anyway. Now I have So Many Thoughts and nothing that I can possibly do with them. Because in order to invent one language I feel like I have to invent all of them to figure out the role that they all play. And before I do that I'd need to extensively map out the cultures and politics of Equestria and beyond over time to see what forces shaped language development. Sigh. Why do I get myself into these things.

Thinking about the languages of other creatures is really cool though. I have to imagine beak-specific sounds or chirps/whistles would play some sort of role in griffon and hippogriff native languages, and hippogriffs turning to seaponies would come with some changes to the language to work around their new extra wet environment. Yaks definitely seem to speak the common tongue in ways that more resemble the structure of their native language. This is all just speculation on my end, but it actually makes a lot of sense that yak language would have a smaller vocabulary, or at least use less words at once while speaking, and generally be spoken louder. I'd imagine in their far north environment, it would be important to get information across to other yaks quickly and effectively, and especially if they're shouting over snowstorms and trying to not freeze their tongues they'd favor shorter sentences and simpler, more direct ways of saying things. It also makes sense that Yona refers to herself by her name while speaking instead of first-person pronouns, again signaling a need for high clarity while communication. If you're stuck in a blizzard and you can't see very far in front of your own face, you don't have time to sit there and try to puzzle out who you're talking to when you're shouting at each other to try to figure out where you are. You all use your own names so every yak can keep track of each other and know who's who at any point.

Anyway. It's way past midnight where I am, I have about fifty gazillion assignments I need to somehow finish tomorrow, and I'm cutting off my rant here for the night. If you read all this, props to you I guess?