Split the article?: Indo European Alien Language

Right now Indo-European Alien Language and Re Lex link to the same article. I think it's not quite fair. As the article itself points out, there is a lot of difference even between Indo-European languages, so there is also a difference between a Conlang simply having "Indo-European" grammar and it being simply English with made-up words substituted for English ones - like there is a difference between Rubber-Forehead Aliens and Humanoid Aliens.

Also, the description of the page is very long. Is that really necessary?

People aren't as awful as the internet makes them out to be.

Dear God, no it isn't.

It's helpful, though, That should be moved to Useful Notes

...if you don’t love you’re dead, and if you do, they’ll kill you for it.

Since no one seemed to be paying any more attention to my suggestion, I went ahead and made the changes myself. Indo-European Alien Language and Re Lex are now two different articles, and the notes about grammar in various real world languages are now at Grammar in Foreign Languages.

What I don't like about the current article is the way that it is written makes it sound like similarities to Indo European languages is somehow a flaw or bad world building.

Re Lex is currently just a stub. We should be able to come up with at least a few examples.

I'm bad, and that's good. I will never be good, and that's not bad. There's no one I'd rather be than me.

I agree that those implications could be toned down a bit, I'm just really bad at descriptions myself. Any volunteers?

Well, it is sort of unfortunate that most con-langs are so similar to Indo-European languages, but that's to be expected. Maybe you guys are referring to an earlier version of the article, but I'm not seeing anything that needs to be toned down that much. It implies that non-IE-based conlangs are better than IE-based ones, which is an entirely different can of worms.

Added to the Tropes Needing Examples page, since I can't think of any myself (maybe Artemis Fowl?).

How about adding the following : Since Tropes Are Tools, what really counts is how an author uses their Conlang in story. A story with a Conlang that shares few similarities with an Indo-European language will still fail if it's a bad story. And remember that as much as authors can try to subvert this trope, similarities to other languages is not a bad thing*

and unless that particular Conlang is going for The Unpronounceable, then all languages will share some very basic similarities.

I'd go on about the similarities, but that's probably too much for this trope article. Also, it says that aversions go under Starfish Language. Should we move those too?

edited 22nd Feb '12 4:51:28 PM by Autumncomet

One Piece blog Beyond the Lampshade

Okay, so are we good with:

• adding "Since Tropes Are Tools, what really counts is how an author uses their Conlang in story. A story with a Conlang that shares few similarities with an Indo-European language will still fail if it's a bad story. And remember that as much as authors can try to subvert this trope, similarities to other languages is not a bad thing[[hottip:*"and depending on how this Con Lang fits into your world, can be a very good thing]] and unless that particular Conlang is going for The Unpronounceable, then all languages will share some very basic similarities." to get rid of anti-IE bias
• moving aversions to Starfish Language, since that's where they're supposed to go
• hunting down examples for Re Lex (I added Artemis Fowl and the Inheritance Cycle)

EDIT: And wow, it would've helped if Re Lex was marked as a trope. Can't believe I missed that. Also, I'm adding in the stuff in my first bullet.

edited 11th Mar '12 6:31:48 AM by Autumncomet

One Piece blog Beyond the Lampshade

Autumn, why is it unfortunate? Most Readers Speak Indo European Languages, so I don't see a problem with that. Are we really expecting authors to learn to speak Tagalog, Chinese, or Q'eqchi', just so they can make their Conlang more "different?"

"Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?" - Phillip Marlowe on tequila, Finger Man by Raymond Chandler.

I don't know, should I have had to learn English (and French) to be able to consume media? It's unfortunate in that many of these authors don't make the choice to look at non-IE languages because IE languages are all they know, same as it's unfortunate many non-IE speakers choose not to learn IE languages even though they can.

Anyway, that's personal opinion and I didn't add it to the page; I just added a section that earlier consensus thought was needed because Tropes Are Tools and we don't need any anti-IE stuff on the linguistics tropes.

One Piece blog Beyond the Lampshade

I'm wondering about where an example should go. In Star Fox Adventures, the language is made by taking each letter and switching it around for another one.

It's currently listed on Cypher Language, but most of the examples on that page are talking about using a completely new alphabet, while the language I'm talking about just swaps all the letters for other letters. Should it stay there, or be moved to Re Lex?

Or should it go on both, since it uses a cypher to create a Re Lex?

edited 16th Mar '12 11:53:21 AM by abk0100

Clocking due to lack of activity.

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.

Can we change the rendering of Re Lex? Because it's supposed to be Relex - the abbreviation of Relexification.

I think I did everything I suggested earlier to clean up Relex. We might be done here?

One Piece blog Beyond the Lampshade

That's the weird capitalization thing. Relex works just fine.

I folderized the page, along with the stuff I did much earlier. I really don't know what else to do. Most of the examples are currently aversions of this trope, just because recording all of the con langs that do this probably would be too difficult.

Can/should we lock this?

One Piece blog Beyond the Lampshade

Got a holler to lock.

Waiting on a TRS slot? Finishing off one of these cleaning efforts will usually open one up.