Star Citizen: CitizenCon 2949 - Xenolinguistics and You

10 December 201901:07:011,509 linesWatch on YouTube ↗

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

00:00:04
hi everyone oh nice to see you nice to see you here from the keynote just ended very impressed at your speed so welcome to the xeno linguistics panel 2949 we're gonna get into the meat of what we've been doing for the past year but first we have a couple of updates and even before that we'd like to introduce ourselves so I'm sherry Heiberg I'm the archivist at C I G I work on Planet stuff I work with Britain on alien languages and I organized confluence got all kinds of projects and Britain and I'm the Britain I'm the Zeno linguist you're at star citizen and have been involved for actually several years working somewhat in the background on on all the alien
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languages so let's meet Chris chris has been working more recently on some exciting stuff and he will introduce himself okay I'm Chris Harrell I'm a font designer I started learning Xian two years ago at the citizencon in Frankfurt and I think right after it I started creating a font that can be used easily or more easily or more natively so I was working like six months on the phone the font and then I am already also a see an expert at the you e-z no linguistic Institute as a discourse server but we provide learning materials
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for interested people and everything you need for server for chien and in languages mm-hmm yeah we're we've all been very impressed with Chris's hard work very happy to have him on as a font contractor without his work we would not have the languages that we have we depended on him very much to get the fonts ready for all the documents that we've put out very much appreciate him and he has a couple of updates he'd like to tell you about okay I think the last year more than enough I was working on working on the Sheehan language document and I've completely worked through the document and found every Sheehan word that was not in the dictionary every word every word more than 500 words to the dictionary so
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currently I think we had we are at 1944 words in the dictionary and yeah I've completely reworked the document to include the new font and in the native writing so it's more and I found our really reformatted the letter of master professor tie so everything is shiny and new mm-hmm yeah and Britain also put out what can you tell them what you put out with the international pronunciation yes so on the screen up here we had almost from the very beginning out the gate people wanting to know precisely what the sounds of Chillon were in IPA in the international phonetic alphabet so it helps for the people who are super picky
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about the way things are gonna sound so we've added a few new sections to the document with Chris's help I hope that everybody will find that information useful yeah it should be published right about now so if you go to the dictionary the Robert space industries website you should see a new update from the overview of the Sheehan language for diplomats Oh Chris you should tell them about how the Xian font that you made works yeah the font is no often type font and it uses a contextual substitution so basically is it's a rule set when you just type in this example shaylen you just type x ii ii ii for the long e then you type I've added numbers that are adjacent to letters they will
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be converted into the pitch marks for something this is the falling pitch in this example is a tattoo then you type su e forswear and then you have to type a zero as a divider because the roots that allows for example the L flemm to fit into into the the second syllable likes well but I won't just want to drive types we're so you have to add the divider after swear and then tie blend and this is a basically nothing not no special characters no code tables or anything it's very easy to type and I want to comment on this because as the primary user of Chris's fought it changed everything I mean it makes dealing with Shion and typing in Xian thousands of times easier than it was
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years ago so Sherry's also right yeah if I use it all the time for various things that we haven't published yet but trust me when I say it's been extremely useful tool for people not only in marketing but in design and the best part is the front will be available in the fan kit soon mm-hmm for all of you to use and enjoy you will enjoy it additionally let's get into the meat of the presentation for the past year we have been working on the banner language the band new language is ready it should be published on the site also right about now it is a 200 page documents in the voice of people who are working for
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the rough society here's what it looks like and let me let me tell you about this yeah so this in a very snarky kind of way says you can't read this yet but you will be able to after today if you study really hard exactly we're going to tell you all about this this new language and how it works mm-hmm so a little bit about the rest society before we get into the banner language if you're not familiar with them they're kind of a blue collar Guild slash Union of haulers and scrappers came together a few hundred years ago during one of the tavern wars they do a lot of trading a lot of war uh all across the verse from the xi'an empire to the banner Protectorate to of course the ue and they put this guide out for their members to help them out in any
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potential dealings they might happen right and we wrote it in the voice of characters their voice of people who live in the universe tell us about your character written my character my character's name is Albion Lacroix and he's a linguist at song University on Terra and he grew up in a family that loved diplomats that interacted primarily with bonnets Oh mm-hmm he speaks Bono pretty well I'll he's pretty good about it and my character Reggie she used to be a hauler now she is a teacher of banyu culture she indentured herself full it for a little bit of time when she was you know just just after getting her equivalency she just wanted to travel around for a while
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in between hauling jobs and she got pretty familiar with vanu culture and consequently that helped her score a teaching job at song University on Terra a little bit safer than always yes favor than hauling and definitely safer than indenture and Osuna soon des is the been you mentor for Reggie who taught her all about by new culture and yes and that is about right here because yeah the mysterious presence that mysterious mysterious we can't meet yeah mm-hmm so you can't have language without culture right absolutely I mean it's it's where I think you you start it's where I always start anyway yeah so the same with Xian before we started work on the
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band new language will and Dave and Adam the narrative team and Brit and I we all got together and we talked we had a bunch of meetings about ways to flush out the band new culture that we hadn't yet fleshed out one of the wonderful things about working with Britain is that when it's time to get the language together he pushes us to expand the culture even further than we've already expanded it so what during the creation of this language we learned even more about the banner that we hadn't already hadn't already known yet yeah she's used to my emails that say what about this what about this so there's no answer when I write then it has to be figured out exactly exactly welcome to world building ma'am so some of the banner keywords that we came up
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with when trying to decide how the language would be colorful colorful because been you love flamboyance they love shiny things they love things that are godly decorated but they also have to be useful which is why we have functional as one of the keywords any venue object that is pretty you can be absolutely sure that it has a function because if it doesn't have a function even if it's pretty bad you think it's useless there's no reason to have it they're very savvy they're very smart they're always looking out for themselves they always want to be sure that they're going to get the best deal in whatever dealings they might be having but they're also very polite because one of the key things in getting a good business deal is to be as polite as possible and to be very good at manipulating language in your favor yes
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yeah at the same time they're also very easygoing when they're not on the clock per se they play very hard they love SATA ball for example one of the fun things that they've adapted from you adapted from human culture they love going out drinking they live partying so if you run into a venue out in bad new world and they're not on the clock and you want to party like you've never partied before just go hang out with them you'll find something yeah if you need to leave bar citizen early don't hang out with the bun no you will not leave early so culture specific words and phrases if that's pretty much everything we came up with yeah like almost everything that is in the language is very tied in with the culture yeah it's a I mean they're you know their everyday words for a door yeah
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yeah we it's nice to have a guideline because it helps you think about how the pieces and parts might fit together and what some of the things that might be emphasized over other things and I'll talk about that a little bit definitely uh so quick overview of the band new for those who don't know what a su lis is because I talked about su Lee's quite in the future of this presentation a Thule is more or less a combination guild and family that venue are raised in it's not they're not blood-related they all gathered together around a specific skill set so like if you're in a Thule say for linguists or say if Britain was a banner Britain would have been purchased on the market for skilled children who are show promising skills and linguists in linguistics Britain
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would have been raised by the venue who bought him they would not be his parents though they would be kind of like combination teachers and bosses so they would be extracting labour out of him but also teaching him the trade and when Britain finally pays off the debt that he accrued during his purchase like what happens is when you get indentured when you are an apprentice who has bought this debt is on you and you have to pay it off for your labor to the zulia that purchased you so once linguists menu Britain comes of age and pays off his debt Britain can either choose to stay with the Zulia that raised him Britain can leave if they didn't treat him well or Britain might have to leave because TSO suli who is the leader of the suely may have divested at that point and we'll get into divestment later so
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that's a quick thing that this is something that comes up over and over again in banned new culture is the idea of su Lee's and the idea of debt and and the cool thing about about the guide that you're gonna get today is that it talks in a great deal of detail and gives examples of how these ideas and concepts play out in their lifecycle and other things there's a lot of detail yeah and you see from these words that we have on screen about the idea of debt or the idea of politeness as well like the words for correct and incorrect are not directly correct and incorrect because both of those like saying someone was perfectly correct would what might might imply that they did so well that you know oh them and if you say that they're directly incorrect that's
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sort of rude to ban you yeah yeah yeah so you you might say something like like if some it's something correct you would just say I know money which means oh you understand you got that you got that right and if if they don't then if somebody doesn't understand you don't want to say oh you're wrong you might just say you know if de Janeiro's or gamma or I'll repeat that or you know I the person who has detected that you are wrong is gonna kind of take some of the responsibility for not for you're not understanding even if it's really not their fault at all so that's that's those play out with the kind of normal conversational bridge phrases that you have in the language - yeah and
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similarly I a direct I'm sorry doesn't exist so if a band knew apologist type to you they will probably say something like I'm sorry you're offended I'm sorry you're upset something like that I acknowledge that yeah you are unhappy about something yes they're saying you're unhappy I didn't do anything wrong but you're unhappy and let's just get that out there and they have no idea of pure art I get more into this later like I said earlier but that object on the screen is it looks very pretty it looks like something you might see on a shelf but it's a tool that banner used to help them make decisions yeah or attract attention yeah there were any kind of the word furs like beautiful or pretty just means it's eye-catching it gets your eye it doesn't necessarily mean that there's some well-defined version of what beautiful is it just
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means people pay attention to it they Lamba they look at it yeah so scavenging and adapting or some other key cultural things that ban you do they are known for finding any good tech that they like or any good ideas that they like and just that like pulling it whole cloth in tube and new culture it's like they find they find a good working engine for example it's not even just like cultural thing it's like oh this engine is great let's just repair it forever until we maybe find something new like they won't buy something or they won't use something just because it's new they will use something new if it's better but otherwise they're just going to keep fixing the same thing as long as I possibly can and this symbol up here real quick is you might have seen it in on the website
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in the in the ship pages maybe it is a stamp it means made by Bhanu it doesn't stand for any corporation because like I said earlier they don't have corporations they don't have inheritance they don't have any like big business or anything they have a bunch of small guilts but they all agree that they are ban ooh and Ben who made this yeah MB bono it just means the the manufacturing of this thing was by bunny yeah and they want you to think that because it was by Bono it's way better than anything else they also have a different time scale that played pretty hard into the creation of the language there's no central clock because they're not really a very they're not a centrally organized socio-political system so they all have personal clocks that count down to their
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divestment their divestment is kind of a combination blowout retirement party and living wake once they get old enough they will give away the wealth that they accrued during their lifetime to the members of their suely and then they'll take a share for themselves and kind of go away and leave their sulie behind and this is another this is another way for Ben you to avoid debt because it's a Ben who gets older they might start slowing down they might start bringing the productivity of the zuly down so they get rid of stuff that they can get rid of they take this stuff and they leave and no one owes each other anything and no one is beholden to anyone and the by knew that divested can go spend the rest of their days betting on races if they so choose or whatever whatever they want to do yeah and so some venue will set contracts by their divestment clock so
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you need to be aware if you're entering into a really long term contract with the Ben you when's your dodo vestment clock running out because maybe they might not tell you you know just depending on what's beneficial to them at the time they're calculating they're calculating yeah but yeah so this will be something that you're on into and it can be a little bit confusing for humans but again because they're bound or they're happy to help you out if you have some questions but you do have to remember to ask them questions so Ben F is eolr G also played a big role in creation of the language because they don't have any gender there's no they don't know he or she they will happily adopt words if you want to be called he or she they don't really they don't really care it's no big deal to them but in there in the core of the language they use a singular day to refer to one another they have very short sleep cycles so they they see that humans
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sleep for around eight hours of time they think that's a little weird that's they think that's Ganga excessive to sleeping for too long exactly they can sleep they can sleep sitting up they can sleep lying down they usually catnap for about eight minutes at the time throughout the day if they sleep for a long time they might sleep might sleep for up for up to an hour it's a really long time and if a bunch of them are tired at once they'll just kind of cuddle on this big sleeping platform in a big banner pile but no it's not necessarily gonna be horizontal maybe they'll lean against the wall maybe they'll just sit in a chair it just depends on how they're feeling at the time and what the suely is like they can also eat or drink almost anything and this is very important for humans to know because their idea of what's poisonous and breathable is very
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different from ours so if you go into a venue only area or a bad new majority area you need to be sure what the atmosphere is made of and you need to be sure that you can eat the food because they can eat or drink almost anything shion food no problem but they like catering to humans so in in any kind of environment that the the bondo wood would be welcoming of humans they understand that oh you need a human toilet and you need beds that are flat that people can lie on and you need food that humans can eat so they are rather aware of the fact that their needs are quite different than human needs absolutely that plays out in a lot of the example sentences - that we have in the document mm-hmm haggling is embedded into the culture we have a big haggling
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section in the document to teach you how to haggle with a venue in the language that they prefer they're always going to negotiate with a smile they love smiling they won't generally haggle inhuman majority areas because they've found based on the rules of the marketplace that most humans aren't gonna beat aren't going to know to haggle or will have trouble haggling so if you in area 18 for example you're probably not going to find a band who's going to haggle with you but if you're in the Protectorate or on one of the flotillas they're all going to want to haggle and they will rip you off if you don't it's to them it's not ripping you off no no it's just like getting what they they wanted it's like you were an idiot for not asking so I guess you deserved this yeah you didn't you didn't take the time to negotiate you weren't willing to whale so yeah you
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didn't you don't deserve a different price as you didn't put in the effort exactly I've touched on debt and indenture as a big central concept in bad new culture I think I covered most of what indenture is in the first light with the apprenticeship but you can also indenture yourself as an adult so if say you take on a huge amount of debt to obey new or in the binary Protectorate or even in human or shion space if you're desperate enough you can sell yourself to ban you silly or to an SS Uli or you can go directly to indentures Uli who will place you into you know something that suits your skills yeah it's like an indenture agency yeah an indenture agency more or less this to the Banu is a the most humane way humane way to pay off debt because to them
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training someone to a debt that they can't pay for the rest of their life and having to live like oh if only I could pay off this debt that to them that's that's monstrous but to us the idea of indenture is monstrous because we're different no it's a there's an example sentence in the document about indenture being a pathway to financial freedom yeah Tom yay to be free of debt yeah and to a to a banner this is just like going through apprenticeship so they really don't see the big deal yeah yeah and now that we've covered a bunch of bits of banyu culture there's a lot more in the rough society document so do read it as soon as you can let's pass the clicker over as you've written and we'll talk about the language I okay that's where we are okay let's keep going in figuring
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out what what created language be in windows function of world-building it's important of course to know what the language is gonna sound like so i'll out the gate with this document we're talking in IPA about how everything sounds it's also important for for immersive experience to have fun writing to deal with right so we have a new writing system that again until today nobody's seen before except Chris see more of it than anybody probably ever wants to what was it like seeing the language for the first time again we can very very very different than our normal human writing and interesting system yeah yeah it's a new it's a new system
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it's kind of similar to some things in human writing and I'll talk about that a little bit coming up but it's also different yes so the other thing is grammar right so there's some things in grammar that are related to to culture directly sometimes and we'll touch on some of those things too but the there is a lot of grammar in the document coming maybe a little bit less grammar than in the hsien document because there's a lot more context about indenture and aging and know other things that are very different about the bonnet but there is a grammar section in there as well but let's start by talking about the sounds so Bona is a is relatively easy I think very easy actually language to pronounce there are
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no types or pitches or anything that's complicated like in Chien yeah there's six vowels but let's start with a few of the main ones first so ah these are very predictable kinds of sounds that occur in human languages most syllables are consonant vowel sodadu D it's very the the SRB the standard romanized banu is is quite easy to read I think oh absolutely but what's a little bit different about it and certainly very different from Shion is that there are lots of consonant clusters double double consonant and then a vowel sound so we get the is this normal to them just like a regular consonant yeah that is not not any different than kha or pas or talk to
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them it's it's just uh it's it's one they think of it as one sound so we get in da and if we add do in D then it's just all not Andy but if this will run together as one word if there were a word and on duty then it would be stressed on the first syllable and I know that because the language has what is referred to as a vowel sonority hierarchy this means that in context some vowels are always treated as stronger and more important than the other ones and the the the vowels go in order I that's technically a diphthong if you know about language but I owe and an eye is always gonna be the strongest
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sound in a word if a word has a I sound in it that's gonna be the strongest whether it comes at the beginning or the end or in the middle if it has an AA then aa is gonna be stressed less than I would be and way down at the other end is all and O is the weakest sound in the bonded language so certain languages tend to have weak sounds so for example an O sound in French and just an E what we'd normally see is a like in the word sure for I for me that drops out a lot so in Bono the Oh drop sout a lot like all the time and let me show you an example of that again it's way down at the the end of the hierarchy so it's always gonna be weak so who's seen this word spell before
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Sully yes so the way sherry just pronounced this is very close to the way the the Bona pronounce it and if we think about the hierarchy then we know that o is going to be very very weak so to the BA know this is three syllables soul ooh and Li but o is super weak it's the weakest it could possibly be so when they pronounce it in everyday speech it just comes out as soldier so the Oh is so quiet that you basically don't hear it it sounds kind of like just su Li but it's technically three syllables in the body language so one quiet syllable yes one of them's just really quiet so let's do a test here so based on the sonority hierarchy of the vowels who has a guess
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how you would pronounce this word okay here in the front G da exactly and that's because an a is always going to be stronger than an AI unless they marked it with like the equivalent of an accent mark or something like that and that happens when they borrow foreign words human words or Shion words sometimes they they put irregular stress but that's because they don't see it as a native Banu word yeah eventually everything turns into everything is Banu eventually yeah but the writing can be quite exotic you might see these and think oh that's six different languages but it's not it's just different fonts so in the same way that we write things in different typefaces for various reasons they do to normally to get
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attention for better marketing to make more money so they care about it for kind of maybe different reasons than we do but everything is still a standard syllable no matter how exotic it looks and I'm gonna step you through pretty quickly how how the basics of the system work so here we have all the syllables using B as a consonant as an example so we get by Bob boobie Bethel and I don't mean to say in the pronunciation rules that that an a sound is never strong if you had a word there isn't one that I know but if you had a word Bebel it would be pronounced Bebel because Bayer is stronger than oh it doesn't mean that you're gonna say bet you know you you you pronounce both of them you just have to give the stress
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where the stress is due and that's on the stronger syllable but in the writing everything is based on a capsule so a capsule can be any kind of shape it can be a perfect circle or oval or square but it's going to come in these variations closed open on the top open on the bottom and open on the top and the bottom and then they stick something in the middle to make the sound so an ass is closed on the top and bottom ik a is open on the top and J is closed on the bottom excuse-me opened on the bottom and closed on the top and F is open on the top and the bottom so once you once you get used to the basic forms of the consonants we then add vowel diacritics to the top and bottom or top or bottom to get the sounds by Bobby foo be faithful I sound like Jolly
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Green Giant or something but gonna go after my blood but these are these are the way that you do vowels on on almost every syllable in terms of the numbers of them and kris has struggled with this for a long time and he's gonna tell you how easy it's gonna be for all of you because of how hard it was for him there also stand alone independent vowels so I and if you ever see a big block of Banu text it's gonna be centered and you know vertically it's always gonna be centered they write everything that way the other thing is that the there's an almost no inflection in the language so here we have the meaning for one wing or five wings in English we would have to have
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an S on wings because it's plural but the bun who simply go for das ego IBAMA or food dilemma and they don't that word go in there as something we'll explain later but there's no change the words just stay the same basically court order is important like it is in many human languages so when Joel booboo or Sarah is when Joel messed up the food maybe they didn't do a great job of cooking it but they do have stomachs of iron oh yeah so with oh sorry yeah boo-boo and Joe the food did not mess up and Joe that's very unlikely to happen yeah I mean it the food won't mess up and Joe he's he's fine yes probably fine Joe's a human right no no is bondo so they they
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yes the Bunner don't use gendered pronounce so everything is gonna be they and there's some tricky stuff about that when it happens in the plural in the language but go read the document about that we don't have time for that today when you say to enjoy Sarah it just means enjoy eat basically and then based on what's going on in the context it's either past tense it's 8:00 or did eat its eat as in as a general rule it's will eat so they don't distinguish tense the way we do they can if they need to there's a way to do it in the language and that's all in the document but they don't do it on a regular basis yeah I didn't touch on this too much during the culture section but they really don't care about what happened in the past to them it just doesn't matter and so that's partially why they don't have a past tense so they don't they
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don't really have much of a future tense either what matters is now yeah they'll talk about that happened already or that's gonna happen soon but they don't really talk about the distant future either yeah yeah neither are useful to them so they just have their clocks yeah if it's not out of one of their clocks where it's gonna happen at some point they just don't even think about it the language has classification which is basically assigning some kind of category to every noun in the language so the Banu are very focused on value of things yes so Zul is something of valuable that's never been alive though is something that is probably valuable and so maybe but it was alive so coal could be food for example that's a common slang word for talking about food but coal could also be the classifier
00:32:45
for a bowl made out of wood because the wood used to be a tree and the tree was alive so they count things the the qualities of things and how valuable they are very differently so is something that's completely worthless you know probably not even recyclable goal is just for average everyday normal stuff that's just sitting around that you don't even think about very much off alpha though is for very fancy stuff like expensive things or somehow prestigious or desirable things or are fancy people so if somebody is deserving of respect are you trying to flatter them for example you might use off to talk about them ICI is four places butoh is for people or animals and this is like animals down to tiny little bugs and stuff when once you get into
00:33:35
bacteria they don't necessarily call that with do but anything that like you could have some kind of relationship with like even have a bug on your finger yeah they think of that as big anga is for abstract things like actions or concepts or ideas and so it's for everything else so anything is particularly odd or strange would get categorized as Enzo hmm so their classification is very important and as an example we talked about the word a puma earlier which means wing like a wing on something food to go boom ah would mean five wings but on a vehicle specifically a vehicle yeah so it's a vehicle is a thing probably made out of metal right so it was that's never been alive but if you have an insect or an
00:34:23
insect like bug and they have a puma on them that's gonna be counted with dole so said look don't eat them I give two wings on some kind of insect or some kind of weird by a mechanical thing that I've never seen before that is live and arthropod yes something they do a lot of borrowing we mentioned this they borrow stuff but they also borrow words so they borrowed the word Tech for example the idea of just generic tech from from humans as cool they loved the way it sounded yeah and they put an extra K on the front because they could and because the word 4000 in Bono is nickel so tech is tickle and tech whoa it means a thousand with the word son know it comes from Shia and son so that means two son is basically you know flight or travel and
00:35:14
they were really into the gravel of technology yeah yeah this young where pine are our pioneers and grab life technology so when the bond who stole that or borrowed it it's more polite word they they borrowed the word for talking about it too so Sano means actually it's a verb that means to travel via gravel of technology and even fossil for the verse got borrowed again funneled into Banu phonology way they would tend to pronounce it there's actually without the M in front of it there's no V in the language there's an F but there's no B so to get a V sound they had to stick an M on it so that's what they did and again they're very casual about everything as long as it's practical and it works they love it so let's give you an example would you like to hear about I'd like to hear what bono
00:36:03
sounds like alright okay a facility Obama signed okay yeah so ty hey you don't sell easily tsukitachi kita indeed single you singing Sally in DeSoto KK oh and I Alanis a to kk e for crystal in available to offer you for football k yeah find out that I pursue Marty faba so ya la x2 lowing I worked oh for sure we are so Ganga financed i sow at home be with a CZ father ty so ty and do a congo diet and and do a go into a go
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rocky that may be too long okay in Zayed I don't know food new tofu vassal Yan dine die mmm-hmm so there you go there's your example of what and next we're gonna talk about the tremendous technical undertaking that it took for all of us to be able to just type ABCD efg or MV or KT as it may be on our keyboards and get the result that you've been seeing on the screen so with great deference and gratitude I pass the clicker to Chris mmm-hmm okay the first step in the creation of the font is that Britain sends me his document where you
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already designed all the forms of the of the length of the writing and everything and basically in a banner you have it's like a matrix you have at at the left in the in the blue in this example it's not everything so that's just me excerpt in blue are the the consonants the pure constant form but normally this this form is not directly written result it's everything all other students written is with the diacritics that formed at the the vowels but these these forms again be typed or can be used to for teaching for example so you can show this is the the the essence of the of the consonant and then you have under the right or the there are six vowels for the for the ie for the for
00:38:39
the a and the other to do and it's just like a matrix them in a table so on the bottom right here you have slow for example you can see there they are elements that that define these dear critics and elements that define the the concept of you a consonant form and my next step was to import the this from from the PDF I got to import this this raw forms and find find a finite set of elements that I was talking about earlier in in banner where where you defined a set of elements that you don't have to to do or everything manually but
00:39:30
you you can combine them like like it like a Lego set you can combine them to build all the characters in the in the alphabet from these components right well it's it's like I mean he had to do a complex visual analysis like ignore all the mechanics of it and and visually analyze what were the all the core element components and how he could break them out and make the smallest set possible yeah to have all the parts that he needed to combine them yeah so when I identified the this set of components then I imported all the elements into my font design application and then the
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next task was to to redo all the the vector data is here on the on the left with was it was a Blue Anchor Point and in the little magnification area you see you see this was the raw source data there you have many many anchor points in the vector data and if you want if you would use this directly as a font you would because in the text you can have hundreds of thousands of character yeah this would be overkill and would would be negative fonts unnecessarily big and it's low so the you have to to redo all on the right side and with the green anchor points you see the the redone a cleaned operation and where all the the roundings are in use you see
00:41:07
even in the in the left side where the red dot is in the end there in the sharp corner they have added a little very small rounded corner so even if you have characters that it got blown over blown for big sinus or something you don't have sharp corners you have everything around it and organic that smooth look the other so basically he had to do a bunch of clean up because I wasn't careful about it and then after after I'm creating recreating the vector data for all the these these components I started to import all the glyphs look at all those glyphs all the raw data clips into into the front application and then I just rebuilt them out of these this component
00:41:58
set and you assume that in the next image you see these are the are the components assembled to one of the characters we saw earlier and in the the highlight areas are the areas where the components they just overlap they don't add on not correct connected but the or the overlap is it's made so it's made perfect that there are no no seams and no edges visible yeah it's really a bit did a beautiful job and when you get to play with it you're gonna be a mean you just like sit there and you're like what if I type this now you have to be typing bound new words you can't you can't type a word that has a th in it for example because they don't even have an H and bunda but as long as you're typing by new words they're gonna appear like magic before
00:42:46
your eyes and word process yeah and the magic is it's a because after this stage when I've created all the all assembled all the the letters and the alphabet from from the components the next step is to add the functionality in OpenType so this is a little excerpt of the OpenType feature code for some of this you see look of ligatures this is the start where i'm the liquor just lookups is defined basically it it goes over the overall the letters and if in the second line 126 for example is just substitute ND z a so when you type n DZ a this route set that's and it replaces the all
00:43:37
four letters by the NDC a ligature so you get the ins our letter when you type it yeah the syllable I'd call it was syllable in honor they called hor hor means a letter or a specific glyph or a syllable of writing mhm so M yeah and there is there's some most special cases where I created additional additional lives in end of in the font and this is for example it is you have two syllables and on the on the left side you see an in red there's the the vertical element it connects to to the to the DDT of critics it's an idiot to your critic on
00:44:25
this letter and it it's a round shape without any any edges but then when you type further you see that then the next ediot area critic it comes very near to the the lower end of the vertical August of the Europe it's called irregular stress mark and when this is the case there's an in there in the Octavio code there's a special rule set and especially blue a template will be used that automatically connects these diacritics Ruthie Ruthie irregular stressed mark to form a connection between them and this is for us it's about nine different cases where this can happen with all the different forms of the acrylics that and our combinations that are possible so he
00:45:14
made he went to a lot of work he did oh they look really pretty effortlessly for everybody out there and for us oh we've had a lot of typing to do and it was all the this special special of glyphs I had to create to be able to combine these together the the banner font has as around nine over nine hundred lives in the font it's not as hard as it sounds yeah I've invested a lot of effort to make it easy to write and after after this step when you have the completed feature code with all special exceptions and there are some things that Brittany
00:46:02
and talked about and and found out about by working with the language and for example Bonta one day I sent me an email that oh we need a complete new new consonant this is possible it okay yes it's possible and I think two hours later I sent him the new sets with all new consonants and vowels because I had the the completed components is what was just assembling them and form new new syllables I think it was more like 20 minutes instead of two hours and he's very good it he's very very good with fall sorry didn't you uh when did you guys introduce the currency symbols kind of late yeah on yeah edit them
00:46:53
later and yeah but that like I sent it to you and I mean an hour later or maybe it was the next morning but it's really easy fast he's really good and by doing this we realized that all this currency and number a situation has added to be added to this year and fun too so we redirect Lee and expanded the see and fun with this functionality too oh yeah that's right the the creation of the buy new font helpful does identify areas that that we needed to patch in the Xian font it takes a village it takes a lot of real case real use cases yeah yeah and it helps like as always it's just like a real language it keeps developing and changing it keeps adapting to new situations as they are eyes just like
00:47:41
the bottom just like the Punnett shall we move show me move on take some questions oh yeah how much time do we have left you'll probably have some time we probably have a little bit I think they'll come they'll come warn us if we don't have time yeah but we'd be happy to take any questions as someone what do you have with I'm gonna repeat the question for the sake of the rest of the audience which human languages were helpful in inspiring the sounds of the binary language so no 1 or 2 languages specifically but I would say the vowels are just kind of pan-european you know I like the I like
00:48:32
the Italian word I so the I sound and the kind of you know that came from that but the the initial nasals like the M and the N coming before the consonants those are common in African languages the sonority hierarchy I think might be like just alien I don't know I mean I would love if somebody knows a human language that has a vowels and sonority hierarchy role like that I really want to talk to you because I couldn't find one so that might be the only thing that's uniquely alien about the way the language works um but yeah they came from kind of all over the place I mean the vowels are pretty generic because we we don't have
00:49:23
consonants at the end we I thought we needed at least six vowels but I also didn't want to make it complicated and put vowels in there that aren't broadly easily pronounceable bye-bye lots of different lots of different cultures human cultures right yeah what one of the challenges of making a truly alien language is that you do have to consider human limitations and speaking it because we want human actors to be able to say it for example not only the fans but me like we have we do have to use our mouth parts to make the language happy yeah I mean when I fantasize about other languages in the verse oh yes I think about some really kind of exotic stuff but you know this this needs to be very approachable and it also works with the bounded culture because they they
00:50:12
just adapt to everything so it makes you think that it could very easily happen that anything that's not convenient for them as rampant traders you know having to interact with other people it would just drop off and their life span is very short compared to ours so grad generation is very short so the language can change very rapidly actually mm-hmm any more questions yes yeah helpful microphone friend yeah I've got two one of them is about culture and the other one's about the written language all right in regards to the coach I notice you have three words for body you one which is an animal one that was organic and that one that is extreme value so is it in band new culture that there is a separation between non
00:51:01
organic and organic but when it gets to a certain level they just become like really valuable and so there's no definite way and in regards to the written language to write it out like in Chinese how you have to go from top and left towards other symbols is a similar thing in the banyan language okay the awful thing is correct that's a good observation yeah once once anything gets to this level of of just being especially important again it could be for value but it could also be for a role in society or something like that actually when I when I addressed Shari in the dialogue I called her office ad and that means that I'm being respectful to her because we I mean because I do respect her but also
00:51:52
it's it's a it's just a nice way to show that you're you're showing normal respect to somebody all right and like if a bond who is trying to sell you something they might call everything that they have offer in a way to like subtly imply they might call their own stuff off a to try to trick you into haggling less maybe and that so there that that's a that can change in the same example with wing Akuma being either this kind of wing or that kind of wing things can shift to and they can they can to be really disrespectful they wouldn't do it to your face I wouldn't think but behind somebody's back they might they might call something so which means oh that worthless piece of blank talking about a thing that normally doesn't have
00:52:39
soul on it so that that can happen to again and playing with the language mhm and about the written language it's written left to right and a kind of normal as we would think about it in English or European language order but it's always centered and the punctuation is a little bit different and funky they have all right you can see an example of the punctuation here in this slide it's punctuated at the both the beginning and the end yeah so that circle that the half circle and the circle says we're starting a sentence here and then the one at the end is that we're ending it here and you'll get unusual things like what we would think of as an entire question in English for example we'll be a statement with a little tiny part in it that's a question so they put
00:53:29
the question marks just around the little tiny part that's a question right so you'll find you do have to learn some you know not typical English European e Asian e kinds of things to to get the punctuation right right um was that a challenge to code the punctuation at the beginning Anand yes partly because we use the like in like in Spanish use at the beginning for the exclamation mark the the upside-down exclamation mark and at the end the normal X the exclamation mark and the same for the question mark but I think the the biggest challenge was to to have the this the the dot at the beginning and the dot at the end because it's the set the same the same character you
00:54:19
typed it is kind of differentiated directly but I had to do to do this by a rule set so there are special cases when you have start one sentence and stop it and start a new sentence so that everything gets formatted right there yeah and then the decimal point is different again and a decimal point is not the same as these periods for sentences and the number the numerals for numbers are very fun for people who like my ass do we have any other questions hi yeah and yeah I was just wondering if the bhanu language has any contractions all slang oh so many nothing but contracts yes almost all contractions and it's it's there are two different ways to speak Bhanu
00:55:07
there's so Pamba which is like really carefully enunciated everything and saying every word separately and then there's zoilo and so yellow means just contracted like air everything runs together so earlier we were speaking primarily as a yellow meaning just the way Bhanu would to each other so that was all contractions yeah it's not really an idea of formality the question was is it a difference between being formal and informal oh it's it's not really that it's just that a contract for example yeah would probably be written so pombe but that's because they're just thinking about it very very carefully and and it
00:55:56
would get more attention but they don't really have a concept of formality around language the way the way we do I mean there's something they would use different words like they would use often and there's ceremonial things that they do that are about you know propriety and being you know being careful but yeah the like they're they their default speech is all zoilo which means just one everything together and you have to ask them to speak so Pumbaa if you need need them to oh yeah and they'd be happy to do so and they can't because they they all the words are individual words but those O's and those e's drop out all the time and that's when something like foyer which means it's mine or it belongs to me just becomes fit dog so the O just goes away and you have to learn that that F at the
00:56:46
beginning is really a different word that got glued on to Eloy so even so ye look into the into the dog um I think there were some questions on the side of the room yes in the white shirt [Music] can you sp yeah I cam sorry I can't hear sorry we saw six ways of writing the same glyph the blue one was the formal one right or that mean this is the pure essence of the typo and then it is it is written a different way by I I don't know users of the language that um may be different in the way they are writing
00:57:33
so does that mean this is the same glyph written in different type typos yes it's just a stylist it's not a question of formal or informal way outside of writing it no it's their idea of changing a style on something is just to to attract attention okay right so they would for documents that need a like a long complicated contract they would tend to write that in a very simple plain kind of font but if they are trying to sell a new invention that they have borrowed from the Xian or something like that they might put a really yeah fancy font on it just so you would pay attention to their advertising or or one they made
00:58:22
themselves just you know hey look at this okay the font that Chris has built that the original easy to read the the one that I designed that's going to be released today right yes is well the font itself will be up soon in the fourth but the rough society document is up right yes so you can go learn how to read it today but that font is designed to be legible even at small type sizes some of these things that I showed you earlier where it looks like horns sticking out and all that other stuff that that would be more for like big advertising on our posters and let's uh let's get your question right there yeah sorry so we don't have much time can you help me my English is not so good I asked it in German okay okay okay did you think of of the physiology of the of
00:59:23
the banner by developing the land in the language so it is there any yes yes not in the sounds of the language but in the in the vocabulary and and a lot of the cultural they're the phrases the common phrases so one of the common phrases is when a human is talking to Bono is can you speak more quietly because their hearing is very bad so they yell all the time so we are more likely to ask them to whisper - what is a whisper to them yeah because it's too loud for us from from a bad new perspective our ears are overly sensitive yeah so they don't think of
01:00:12
themselves as hard of hearing they just think of us as really like okay I guess I guess I'll whisper for you you I'll help your delicate ears it's just it's all a matter of perspective yeah yeah and do we have any more questions before oh so many all right you talked about how borrow the the languages or the words from other languages that they have contact with how do would they refer to someone who's well known for instance a well-known trader of the cheiron's or the day of the UE so the native how do would they convert the name that they would not pronounce in their proper language with the syllables and so on oh I see they'll they'll get as close as they can with what they're they have the ability to pronounce they might they
01:01:00
might drop a syllable here they're just they wouldn't it wouldn't they were not necessarily dropping a syllable there's kind of compressing a syllable like um what's your name what's your name I'm sorry I could Andrew Andrew so Andrew would be on dough with uh oh that you would try not to say there's a mark actually in the language that you can put on an O sound that says the Banu try not to pronounce this so they could probably manage undrew pretty well yeah they could say that now most names in Banu um start in fact all native names in bondage start with a consonant so a name starting with a vowel is kind of unusual to them because
01:01:49
all the nouns in the language start with vowels so there's an explanation in the document about what happens when you have a name like Henry which they would call envy or yen D you know they they do make some changes but there's some hints in the document about what you would do to make your name work in bonda yeah yes absolutely good question either you mentioned how you came up with the concept of a language to be pronounceable by people for the purposes of acting it is there an appetite to make a language that could not be spoken by people and perhaps have to be synthesized to be used in the game I can't say either way that we have anything like that planned it sounds like it would be to me that would be a
01:02:36
really fun Avenue to explore there are some ideas that we've passed around and among the narrative team that again I cannot get into but oh man let me an idea I have an appetite for it yeah definitely see how that plays out yeah and then the other question I had was the glyphs are quite complex is there a sort of shorthand handwritten version of the language there yes quickly yeah they're there nothing is published yet and I wouldn't say that it's absolutely completely fleshed out yet but in the early stages of prototyping what Banu might be as a written language I did come up with a shorthand but it is considerably harder to read than what you see up there
01:03:26
because of because of what they do to get a cursive simplified writing yes out of that so for the time being the closest thing to to writing will be you saw it in some of the the font looking things up there where it's just The Strokes are not so straight and formal but there is a way to have pretty handwriting and Bono already in a couple of the examples document and just to emphasize venue as a language is very forgiving as long as you get an approximation of the shapes that are in it it doesn't have to be that perfect curve it doesn't have to be that perfect balance this is very much the Times New Roman to any English handwriting yeah this is yeah you don't you don't need to worry about getting this precisely right yeah the writing is based on these rules
01:04:14
about the capsule and as long as you have something that is a standard capsule ish shape and the openings are where they need to be and the curves in them I mean if the curve is bumpy at the left and smooth at the right then as long as it's always bumpy at the left and smooth at the right it doesn't really matter how how bumpy it is at the left correct there's a lot of tolerance I think for for variation mm-hmm are we still good on time we were told we had five minutes a little while oh okay so maybe one more question yeah does anybody have yeah okay right in the middle I'm sorry I can't hear you come yeah if you could just speak louder
01:05:02
no no colorful yes well they like they like colorful they like shiny things but that doesn't mean necessarily mean everything is gonna be like that it's like um like human culture is very many and varied we tend to like fashionable things we tend to like nice things but not all of us do basically yeah and they they I mean again this is my assumption so I invite you office city to correct me if I'm wrong but um they they want their
01:05:52
customer to be happy too we do yes so they they would it would not be unusual for them to adapt something not necessarily to their own personal cultural taste in the hopes that it would make you know nan Banu happy about something right all right okay um thank you so much for all the time that you took today to attend our panel we loved your questions we love being able to tell you about the banner language that we worked so hard on for the past year and we're looking forward to seeing what you do with it now let us out in the world one thing I wanted to add in currently in the in spectrum we have
01:06:40
washed on the sea unsaid we do hope that I think there would be other day we did added a we added a banner chat room today this morning so if you want to go talk and Bono you can do it right now yeah all right [Applause]

Transcript from YouTube’s automatic captions — punctuation and Star Citizen jargon are approximate. The video itself is hosted by CIG on the official channel.