Suggestion: OA in spanish. Is this possible?

[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.