Suggestion: OA in spanish. Is this possible?

[extherian]

I wonder do the Chinese read Sci-Fi, or are they just spoonfed everything they see and hear by their government.

You're joking/trolling right?

Well, I know the Chinese have Sci-Fi literature, but I was thinking of something more along the lines of a Chinese equivelant of Orion's Arm. It's hard to imagine a government-controlled Sci-Fi setting being anything as imaginative as the Orion's Arm scenario.

[stevebowers]

The sci-fi market in Russia is very large, and they have some very good material in their SF literature. On the other hand Chinese SF has been disregarded and even repressed in the past, but now seems to be having a renaissance.
https://best-sci-fi-books.com/13-best-ch...ion-books/
Folding Beijing and The Three-Body Problem look intriguing.

[Drashner1]

The Orion's Arm canon is that all earth languages aside from English, Mandarin and a couple others died out, and the many languages in the setting today are heavily derived versions of English. With that in mind, it seems ironically appropriate that no other language other than English is available.

Actually, that's not entirely correct.

Per this page HERE

Prior to the Technocalypse a lot of languages on Earth had either died out or been reduced to something just spoken out of cultural pride or the like although there were quite a number of exceptions for major languages. From the article:

Such widely spoken languages as Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese, Arabic, Bengali, and Japanese managed to survive and even thrive as first languages, but many others had become secondary, used very locally or learned in school as a matter of ethnic pride if they were not entirely extinct.

Anglish (a derivative/descendent of English) was a sort of common tongue in many cases, either learned as a first language or as a second language (similar to English in RL) for trade, education, global interactions, etc. Note that 500 years is a long time and that the 'Anglish' in use prior to the Technocalypse probably:

a) Would sound VERY strange, verging on not understandable to English speakers in RL just due to language drift - although recording technology might tend to combat that to a good degree.

b) Incorporated a lot of words from other languages, or derived from other languages - Spanish and Chinese seeming to be the obvious ones from our perspective, but also some Arabic, Indian words and phrases and more than a few words pulled from the various African languages, since we describe the African continent rising to be a major power before the T.

Regardless, all of this got totally blown out of the water by the Technocalypse and the spread of Terragens across the stars. The consolidation of language that was going on prior to the T got totally reversed and languages diverged all over the place and in some cases languages simply arose or were created.

By Y11k, there are likely thousands of different languages at least and possibly millions. In particular, note that lots of provolved sophonts, neogens, and inhabitants of the cybercosm are going to have languages much better suited to their physiology and circumstances and which might be totally beyond our ability to understand without translation tech - which might itself involve installing a temporary mental overlay so you can 'walk in the shoes' of who you are speaking to to some degree so you can understand what they're talking about.

The languages that are listed on the EG article cited above should be seen as representative examples, not the sum total of all the languages in the setting (there are actually some languages mentioned in passing in various articles that aren't listed here - we should update this article just to fix that). That's generally a good rule of thumb for almost anything described in the setting actually, unless we've gone out of our way to explicitly state that at thing or list of things are the only examples of their kind in the setting. Even then, it's probably a good idea to ask the forum about articles that say that, especially if the article is older, just to make sure that the article doesn't need an update. Any article more than 10 years old (with no updates listed in that time) is probably worth asking about.

Hope this helps,

Todd

[extherian]

Such widely spoken languages as Hindi, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese, Arabic, Bengali, and Japanese managed to survive and even thrive as first languages, but many others had become secondary, used very locally or learned in school as a matter of ethnic pride if they were not entirely extinct.

Yeah, that was an oversimplification on my part, but essentially only the "big" languages survived. Spanish wouldn't be among the languages that died out, though, you're right about that.

By Y11k, there are likely thousands of different languages at least and possibly millions. In particular, note that lots of provolved sophonts, neogens, and inhabitants of the cybercosm are going to have languages much better suited to their physiology and circumstances and which might be totally beyond our ability to understand without translation tech - which might itself involve installing a temporary mental overlay so you can 'walk in the shoes' of who you are speaking to to some degree so you can understand what they're talking about.

True, but nonetheless many planets, habitats and megastructures retain names from Latin, Greek and the Nordic languages that influenced English. I often Google the names of worlds like, say, Heimat, to find out if it matches an existing word. Turns out Heimat is from German, and the name of the "Gahn" Space Agency is a Swedish surname. There's an awful lot of very familiar words in this setting, considering the amount of language drift that's supposed to have taken place.

The languages that are listed on the EG article cited above should be seen as representative examples, not the sum total of all the languages in the setting (there are actually some languages mentioned in passing in various articles that aren't listed here - we should update this article just to fix that). That's generally a good rule of thumb for almost anything described in the setting actually, unless we've gone out of our way to explicitly state that at thing or list of things are the only examples of their kind in the setting. Even then, it's probably a good idea to ask the forum about articles that say that, especially if the article is older, just to make sure that the article doesn't need an update. Any article more than 10 years old (with no updates listed in that time) is probably worth asking about

I think that accounts for just about every article I read! Most of them seem to have been written around 2001 or 2002, although the oldest articles from the Inner Sphere and Solsys have been updated since them.

Some of them would take a lot work to fully integrate into the setting as it is today. That was what I was trying to do with my Yas Om rewrite, but apparently I managed to throw out everything that made them interesting to begin with.

[Drashner1]

True, but nonetheless many planets, habitats and megastructures retain names from Latin, Greek and the Nordic languages that influenced English. I often Google the names of worlds like, say, Heimat, to find out if it matches an existing word. Turns out Heimat is from German, and the name of the "Gahn" Space Agency is a Swedish surname. There's an awful lot of very familiar words in this setting, considering the amount of language drift that's supposed to have taken place.

I strongly suspect that that is mostly due to the majority of the project contributors coming from parts of the world where English is the primary language and the project itself being in English. Of those members who maybe have English as a second language, most of them that I'm aware of still come from parts of the world influenced by those languages.

It's actually kind of amusing that you talk about familiar words in the setting since one of biggest complaints we get from folks new to/unfamiliar with OA is the huge number of neologisms that we have all over the place Not laughing at you by any means, but it just touches my sense of humor based on past experience.

Moving to more concrete matters - If anyone wants to add names and terms based on different languages into the setting, they are more than welcome to do so. The main limitation/challenge at this point is that our Content Management System is designed to handle English and can also work with some mathematical expressions - so any names or terms would need to work in that range, at least in translation. While Chinese, or Arabic, or Russian or whatever alphabets would be great fun to include, we don't currently have a way to do that - short of making images and putting them inside the article as images - which we've done from time to time. I'm not sure if adding that capability would be easy, hard, or in between.

I think that accounts for just about every article I read! Most of them seem to have been written around 2001 or 2002, although the oldest articles from the Inner Sphere and Solsys have been updated since them.

Sorry about that. A lot of the main 'Topic' articles tend to be older as well as a lot of the 'summary' type articles. If/when you encounter something that seems to be out of date, whether in comparison to other things you've read or to responses you've received on the forum, please let us know and include a link to the relevant article. We'll get them all updated eventually.

Some of them would take a lot work to fully integrate into the setting as it is today. That was what I was trying to do with my Yas Om rewrite, but apparently I managed to throw out everything that made them interesting to begin with.

I suspect you're being far too hard on yourself. I haven't had a chance to really sit down and give your revised article a read thru. Life (both in and out of OA) is very busy right now, although I'm trying to stay at least partly caught up.

Please aim to periodically 'bump' your article so that it doesn't fall off the radar and continues to gather feedback until you feel ready to do a new draft. As part of that, I will try to give it a read thru and provide feedback within the next week or two.

Hope this helps,

Todd

[stevebowers]

I take the position that many planets would be given names in Old Earth languages, including English, German, French, Hindi, Mandarin, Spanish and so on, so they would often seem strange to the colonists living there. This is useful from their point of view, since a planet named (for example) 'Home' in the modern language used at the time might be the source of confusion for the colonists.