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Polyglot

Polyglot
Image from Steve Bowers

A term which in the Interplanetary and early Interstellar Era came to signify a synthetic language that developed amongst transapients. With their increased memory and linguistic skills, First Singularity minds were able to easily master all languages that had developed in the pre-singularity period. When speaking together, many transapients began to fall into the habit of rapidly shifting languages to better express a concept or mood, as certain words in each language have untranslatable combinations of literal meaning and connotation. Eventually this method of communication coalesced into a single language with a gigantically complex grammar and unmanageable (to modosophonts) vocabulary.

Polyglot statements have hundreds, sometimes thousands of synonyms of varying shades of meaning and connotation to choose from (Transapient poetry reached previously unimagined heights using Polyglot). As time passed transapients, with their greater mental faculties, were able to make finer distinctions than their hu predecessors, and also to discover concepts unknown to those hu, for which they often simply made some of those synonyms now have specific meanings.

Over the centuries, Polyglot grew in size and complexity, and splintered into untold branch dialects. These branch dialects began to disagree on lexicon, especially as the modosophont languages that formed the basis of Polyglot continued to diverge and develop.

With its nascence in the minds of transapients, but its roots in the languages of baseline, nearbaseline, and tweak humans, Polyglot was naturally an object of fascination to some modosophonts. An infamous Early Federation virchpamphlet by the hu supremacist group Seeds of Terra claimed that Polyglot was intended as nothing more than a social control tool, and that even a non-fluent modosophont listening to a Polyglot conversation could be subject to subtle memetic programming. On the other hand, during the Taurus Nexus's heady days of scientific and cultural experimentation, Superior Clarimond Temaere founded a subculture known as the Exegetes dedicated to participation in the elaborate artistic and cultural forms that had developed around the Polyglot language family.

The Exegetes used cyborg augmentation combined with highly active exoselves to develop facility with the entire vocabulary and grammar of the Aldeberan dialect of Polyglot. Reaction from local transapients ranged from amused to curious to dismissive. It seems that even when maximally optimized for the task, a modosophont is a limited discourse partner in Polyglot due to lack of the metacognitive, evaluative, and logical faculties that post-singularity beings possess. Thus e will quickly display a lack of true understanding of the conversation even if e is fluent in all the words being used, a phenomenon similar to the interactions of primitive Information Age charactersims.

The Exegete movement would eventually die out, but certain pieces of poetry, drama, and nonfiction created by members went on to play an influential role in the culture of the Taurus Nexus and its successor civilizations. After numerous conversations with transapients, Clarimond Temaere compiled her experiences in the provocative and elliptical virch Nine Forms of Victory, before beginning a quest for ascension. She achieved the First Singularity in 2644 A.T.

Despite the creation of numerous other postsingularity communication forms, highly derived forms of the Polyglot family of languages are still spoken among themselves by a few transapients (usually S:1) in the Inner Sphere worlds and certain sections of the Terragen Federation Hinterregions. Of course, when speaking to subsingularity sophonts they must drop back to what the transapients often refer to as a "fractional" language.
 
Appears in Topics
HyperturingLanguages & LinguisticsTransapients
 
Development Notes
Text by Glen Finney
with additions by Madine
Initially published on 25 July 2005.

 
 
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