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Saturday, March 25th, 2006While I’ve been out here on the boat, I’ve had a lot of free time on my hands and with that free time I’ve solved one of the greatest porblems of mankind. What language will the comeing galatic federation speak?
I’ve come up with a galatic pidgin that is easy to learn and pronounce in most possible alien languages, as long as they are vocalized.
In order for it to be easy to say I’ve limited it to 3 begining consonants, and 3 vowels. Thats it. Then you have a totality of 9 possible sylabes. This may seem like not enough to have a languge but if you combine these into words with a max of 4 sylables you have over 6000 possible words. The special english that the VOA uses only has 1500 words. Since this is just a basic language to make sure you don’t blow up each others starcruisers or when you met an alien in a bar you can order him/her a drink it dosn’t have to get too complicated.
So The three consonants should be easy to pronounce. I would suggest t, s, and m, I don’t know the lingusitic terms but all these are produced in different ways and are not easily confused (t and k are both produced in similar ways and thus could be easily confused). Alien races would then select consants that are similar to those three. For vowels I would have 0, A and E, but you could do three different tones if you wanted to get all chinese about it.
The grammer is an interesting question. SInce many words would sound similar, it woul dbe useful to have word endings, perhaps to indicate what part of speech a word is, or tense, but this wouldn’t be neccessary.
Writing in this language is even easier than speeking it. It’s alphabet is simply 1-9, each number coresponding to a predefined syllable. So even no vocal species could communicate using numbers.
More work needs to be done, but we are well on our way to completing a workable intergalatic language.