Kavaeric
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[Commentary] Light Era Han psuedolanguage
🕑 Added 2024-04-22 15:38:06 +0000 UTCOne area I've never really wanted to touch in my worldbuilding was conlanging. As someone who has had a lot of experience worldbuilding and engaging in such communities during a past tenure as a worldbuilding moderator, conlanging always felt like making detailed maps or loads of flags or wiki pages to me: something that's really technically impressive, but is more superficial to the actual meat and potatoes of the culture they're associated with. Additionally, it's just a lot of pain to come up with something, and truthfully most of it is not going to matter a lot to people.
Nonetheless, while I don't care much for the conlanging itself, the superficial aesthetic aspect of having the diagetic language appear in depictions of Light Era was still interesting to me. It would be another method to highlight the cultural differences between my audience and Light Era, especially as I've moved towards using the setting to explore ideas of East Asian culture from a diasporic point of view. Contrary to what a lot of people believe, I'm not actually a native speaker of Chinese or Japanese despite my background: I'm still heavily reliant on translators and dictionaries to assemble sentences, even if I still have internalised a fair amount of the grammatical nuance in each. Although it's possible, straight-up using Chinese or Japanese in Light Era doesn't feel congruent with the whole diasporic angle I'm trying to inject into the setting.
I also didn't want whatever choice I made to limit my ability to express my worldbuilding via graphic design. It meant that inventing a new writing system was out of the question—having a wealth of typefaces shuttered on me would be unfortunate. I would still want to be able to experiment with CJK-style typography (vertical writing, right-to-left writing), and I experimented with that in English for some time: if you're wondering why I sometimes typeset mirrored right-to-left, that's why. There were also concepts inspired by "Square Word Calligraphy", a project by Chinese artist Xu Bing where he developed a system for writing English that turned letters into radicals, imitating the look and feel of Chinese calligraphy. Again, though, a dearth of any typefaces that would support this would eliminate this as a possibility.
After banging away at this for some time, I think I've come with a solution that feels satisfying: a psuedolanguage based on Japanese grammar combined with the Korean and Chinese writing system. It'd still let me use my existing library of CJK typefaces, notably the Source Han and Noto collection, while capturing the feel of being diasporic by being both extremely East Asian yet a hodgepodge mashup of multiple ideas. Both East Asian and non-East Asian audiences would perceive the language as foreign while ascribing the origin to the other.
As a final cherry on top, I named it after a common sci-fi trope of referring to a galactic standard lingua franca as "Pan": this is Light Era "Han", which appropriately references both the writing system "hanji" or "hanzi" in Japanese and the word for the Chinese language "hanyu" in Mandarin. Incidentally, it also sounds like the word for "half" in Japanese, which I think is appropriate given the collage of influences.
Attached are two generated voice lines of the two sample sentences in the picture. What fun.
![[Commentary] Light Era Han psuedolanguage](https://img5.patrefans.com/storage/5/se/bi/563145-019e8a7f-28c9-79a1-81fb-90a92d774c5e.jpg)
![[Commentary] Light Era Han psuedolanguage](https://img5.patrefans.com/storage/5/xi/ii/563145-019e8a7f-28db-72ad-ae23-b6086f8d4e06.jpg)
