Happy Hour Interview: The Xi'an Language and YOU

As far as I know, yes. I'm the only person working on languages. But the more complex answer to that is that a lot of the language stuff is very culturally relevant. So there's a lot of interaction with Cherie and other people on the lore team. And eventually there are going to be a lot of people making contributions to the language from the community too. So I am the kind of nexus, I guess you'd say, for the alien languages as they relate to the alien cultures. But we're kind of all in it together at some point too. So right now I guess I'm the go-to guy.

Yeah, on the lore side, Britt always brings up really good questions about the development of the language, and he brings culture into the equation, because as we all know, you can't really develop a language without knowing a bit about the culture of the people that it's coming from. So when Britt asked us about how do they have relationships with each other, what's their family life like, what are their careers like, we had to come up with all kinds of stuff that we hadn't really put a lot of development in before. And so just from this development of the Xi'an language, we have had a huge push forward on who the Xi'an are as people.

Yeah, I'm always poking a lot. I'm like, what about this? What about that?

I'd like to say right out that the direction for the Xi'an to be a more vertically-centered people was one of the foundational ideas behind them that came straight from Chris Roberts himself. So his direction to Lore and to Britt was to develop a culture and a language that centered around the idea of verticality.

And the vertical, I mean, again, human language, humanoid language is essentially linear, right? So it can go from right to left or left to right or theoretically bottom to top, although that doesn't happen very often, and top to bottom. So we looked at, okay, how can we make it vertical, but also then have it play nicely on the interwebs, and how can it fit okay into most of our Roman alphabet based stuff that's going to be written horizontally. And the way to do that was to look at the model that the Koreans took when they created their alphabet many hundreds of years ago. And so it works in blocks that can go from left to right or from top to bottom. And theoretically, it could go from right to left, but that's not as common, again, on the internet and using the other mechanisms that everybody is enjoying now to use the language. So we did these blocks that every syllable fits into a block. And there was a model for this in human languages already. Certainly, if you're Korean and you're learning to read Xi'an, you're in the same boat that everybody else is, because the letters don't look anything like Korean letters. But the system, the idea is similar to the way Korean letters fit into syllable blocks.

That's a great question. The specific ones you mentioned will not be added to the proper language, the language that is the kind of textbook written language. They won't be added because that's not the way languages, humanoid languages, actually behave. Eventually, we'll be talking a little bit more about the service dialect, one of the other major languages that's spoken across the Xi'an Empire, and it does include a lot of those sounds, both D and V, that enable the Xi'an, who almost all of them are completely bilingual because they all do military service, so that means that they're able to pronounce a lot more things than show up in the proper language. So if you have a name, for example, that includes a D or a V, like Dave, for example, there will be a way to... Random example. Completely random example. You'll be able to get close to pronouncing that in a way that you would recognize it as a native speaker of Dave. And the Xi'an would also be able to recognize that, oh, most of the sounds in your name as a human are coming more from our service dialect than they are coming from our proper language. So the story of this phonological unfolding will continue maybe even next week, although I won't give away any concrete spoilers.

Yes and no. Let me think if there's anything in there specifically from Icelandic. Well, there's the TH sound that English has also that is really beautiful in Icelandic. I was in Iceland for the first time last year and found the language really beautiful. I'd never been around it before. But it's not based specifically on any single human language. There are many ideas from the language, especially the phonology, that come from Asia, that are inspired directly or indirectly by a kind of mashup of what happens with pitch in Japanese and tone in Thai and Chinese. There are some grammatical structures. I mean, even the way some of the verbs work, where there's a verb and you put a content word after it in order to make it mean a broader meaning. There are several human languages that do that. One of them is Japanese. It has this thing where it says something or other "suru", and that means to do something or other. And that structure exists in Xi'an the other way around, where you say "o", and then something or other that you're doing. So I will be putting into the dictionary soon "oyata", "yata" meaning cloth, and "oyata" would mean that you're weaving cloth, essentially. You're taking fibers and weaving them together. So there are some parallels from human languages, but the word "yata", for example, didn't come from Chinese or Thai or Japanese. Yata could be a word in Japanese. It could be a word in any language almost, because the sounds in yata are so basic. But I'm not aware, that's not like a Bantu word that means cloth. No, I don't take words that have meanings in other languages and then adapt them directly into Xi'an. Now, that's not to say that there aren't some tricky, funny, Easter egg-y kinds of things going on where I take a word and it means something completely different in Xi'an. That does happen and could happen and could continue to happen, because I think that this is fictional. And while I want it to be realistic and I want the language to be fully grammatical and usable, it should also be lots of fun. So I don't see any reason that it can't be full of Easter eggs and other fun stuff.

To do something is specifically "o", it's just the sound "o".

Oh no, one of the jokes that we had when I was taking Japanese classes in high school and college was to put the "to do" verb at the end of anything, just for fun.

Oh, and that happens a lot in Japanese too. You get these innovations that come up in Japanese too, where they take an English word pronounced in Japanese and stick "suru" after it, and then it's a new verb, or a new word. That's the way Xi'an builds half of its verbs. I mean, half of the things that you would use as a verb in a sentence. It sticks things together. So they don't conjugate. The verbs don't have endings on them like I go, she goes, with a Z sound on the end of it, spelled with an S. I don't know why, but anyway. They don't conjugate like that.

Sure. Exploring. One of the things he really pushed us towards would be developing a Xi'an model for interpersonal relationships. So family, romantic relationships, anything you can think of, like professional, sexual, whatever. And one of the things we really dug down into was to figure out how Xi'an would approach the idea of romance. Because as Britt pointed out, that's something that I'm sure the players want to know about, because if you're reading about them, writing fiction, figuring out how they interact with each other, you have to know at least a little bit about that. And because of the way their family works and the way they reproduce, the idea of sex is not really related to romantic relationships for Xi'an. Mating is just, you know how Vulcans do Pon Farr every seven years? It's sort of like that. Mating doesn't really have anything to do with romance. What matters within their culture is deep, long interpersonal relationships. And so Xi'an will normally have, I'd say, around two or three constant romantic partners that they choose to spend their lives with. And they kind of develop their interpersonal family around that little clutch. And most of them will stick together, if they really like someone. You know how we get married to one person? They kind of get married to three people. And it may or may not last their entire lives, but the idea is that it's something that's not entered into lightly. It's something that is supposed to be lifelong, and you spend your time helping your partner and living your life with them. And because of Britt, we were able to develop that as a team in lore.

Yeah, their idea of family, their word for family, "pyahai", does not equate directly to what we have in human culture, even several hundred years in the future. So if they were asking us about our family, they would only have the term pyahai to use to talk about it. But again, you're kind of almost there in understanding each other culturally when you're using a word like that where there's no exact equivalent. But it's been a lot of fun to figure out where they do have exact parallels with us. I mean, if you're a truck driver on a Xi'an world, it's just like being a truck driver anywhere else in the 'verse. But if you're starting to talk about your family or the kinship terms, because of the fact of the mating process and the society being matriarchal, and really the mothers and the grandmothers only being super important in any kind of genetic history or your genealogy, there aren't any real fathers on the genealogical tree. You're just dealing with who your mother and your great-grandmother and your great-great-grandmother and your great-great-great-grandmother are. They live so long that you can have multiple maternal grandmother people back on your tree and you still know them. It goes back generations and generations even during your lifetime. So there are all kinds of interesting things about the kinship system and their terms for mother and father, because there is a biological father, of course. But they don't conform directly to our ideas of mother and father, and they have different diminutive terms and different names for different members of the pyahai, because you could have a sibling who is not your biological sibling. That could happen very easily in a pyahai. There are all of these quasi-siblings, like stepbrothers and stepsisters. The only word we have for it is step, but when we stick step on sister, it doesn't mean exactly the same thing to us that it would mean to them, because the biological nature of it is not so important.

No, no. It's all about the interpersonal relationships and far, far less about biology. A lot of our family terms are related to who is your biological parent, who is your biological mother, but they don't care too much about that. And this isn't to say that they don't have male Xi'an role models in their lives. Within the pyahai, they have the romantic partners of their mother, or aunties and uncles, who are pretty much the cultural equivalent to fathers that we would have.

Right, exactly. But you could easily end up with two of them, for example.

Yes, absolutely.

I mean, you could have a mom and two dads or two moms or three moms and one dad who's not always there because he's technically a part of a different line, so you don't see him all the time. So there are all kinds of cultural things that go on, and those need to have a reflection in the language, and that's one area in language where we do get very specific things going on. We do get very different things from what we would have in English or what you'd have in French going on, because they do have very, very different systems, very different relationships.

The phonology, yeah, the sounds of the language. Well, we had to make some decisions early on based on some timelines that I won't go into. Based on that, we decided, and Josh Herman has humorously brought this up before, that, oh, they're going to have to have lips. Yeah, because they have M's, "ma". You can't really make a correct "ma" sound without lips. So we are going to continue to factor that into the other languages as they're created moving forward. And in this particular case, a kind of fully formed, fully rigged Xi'an individual, mouth, face, vocal tract, was not available at the time that some of the language got made up. But in the future, I hope with some of the other scenarios, we'll know more about their physiology before I start applying phonology to the languages. So it's somewhat of a chicken and an egg thing. In this case, we decided the chicken would have to have lips.

Yes. I mean, I cannot tell you what the names of all the rest of them are yet. There's still a lot of world building going on. There could be a Xi'an world in which they could very, very fluently pronounce Dave. That is possible. At this point, the Dave language is not fully invented or fleshed out, but it is theoretically possible. They have a gigantic history, which we have thanks in large part to who is sitting right there on the other side of the screen. So they have a very long history. They've inhabited multiple worlds. So yes, I imagine there would be lots and lots of languages, but at this point, we're focusing on scope, and first we're focusing on getting the proper language fully fleshed out. And while we're doing that, we're throwing in some spice here and there from the service dialect.

Yeah, it's a very common occurrence in Star Citizen. It's human nature, really. You start work on one thing, and then people are like, oh, what about this other thing? What about this other thing? It's like, let us finish this one.

Well, yeah, but it's a practical thing, too. Inventing a language, especially the process of fleshing out the lexicon, that is all the words that are in the dictionary, that is a really long, involved process. I mean, there are people who invent languages who just write a little algorithm or they create their own custom app on their iPad to generate. They'll generate 10,000 words. They'll take a list of English vocabulary and then they will just go, okay, computer, make up all the words. And that works great if all you're doing is trying to prove a concept for a language that's kind of grammatically weird, for example. I mean, you could do that. But when you're deciding that, oh, it doesn't really matter culturally who your father is, all of a sudden, all those words that you would generate for father and grandfather and uncle and all these other things, they wouldn't make a lot of sense for this alien culture. So we can't do that. We need to look at how the Xi'an culture actually works and be very careful about building. So we don't do any kind of automated process like that. I don't use any automated process like that, other than I often take an Excel spreadsheet or some other kind of spreadsheet and I build out all the legal sounds that you can have in the language. Somebody asked earlier about B's and D's being missing. There is no language on earth, anyway, that has all the sounds of all the languages in it. That doesn't exist. Part of what defines a language is what's missing. But there are languages that have lots and lots of sounds. English has a lot of sounds compared to Japanese. Almost every language has a lot of sounds compared to Hawaiian, for example. Hawaiian has a very, very constrained phonological palette, but that makes it seem very Hawaiian. Everything is just consonant vowel, consonant vowel, consonant vowel, consonant vowel, and that gives it its character. And we did put some tricky THL and a KR and a KL in Xi'an that you might not necessarily expect to occur in a language that has the rest of the phonology that it has. So we are doing a few kind of tricky, possibly linguistically implausible things. But again, this is fictional and it should be fun and we should be allowed to have fun with it. So we cannot put every sound in. You're not going to get all of the clicks from South Africa in there, for example. That's not going to happen in the Xi'an language. Sorry. That's not to say that there might not be some other culture that exists in the 'verse that has them, but it's better, I think, experientially, and it's more realistic if Xi'an doesn't have all the possible sounds that might happen.

Yes. Oh man, this is a great question. I don't want to answer it fully today because I'd rather we save it. But we came up with what would be considered the most culturally cool way of singing to the Xi'an, which relates sort of to their religion and the way they see the world and the way they process time.

But yes, they do. Their art, especially art that would not be still art, anything that might be experiential art, or their music, it's going to be really fascinating. And if you have access to the dictionary, again, I'm not going to give anything too much away, I hope, but go look up the word "al" with a long A. And that's a hint about how very different their experiences of music and other things will be from what we experience typically when we think about art and music. It'll be quite different, but I think it'll still be super fun for us. We probably won't be able to experience it in exactly the same way that they can, but I think it'll still seem super cool to us.

Those are the particularly Xi'an things. They share a lot of things aesthetically with us too, like the way they approach fiber craft, their clothes and things. They can appreciate a lot of the same things we do, like an artful arrangement of patterns or jewels or folds in the fabric or color. They're very into that as well. So our idea from lore is approaching it and giving them something that does define them as alien, but also presenting some common ground, because culturally we both have eyes, we both can appreciate things in a kind of aesthetically pleasing way, and it gives us common ground, and I think that helps in Xi'an-human relations, which I hope improve moving forward.

Yeah, I mean, why not? I can always hope, right, that everything gets better. But they also have the ability, if you think about art and sculpture, to work with a lack of gravity that we don't have right now, certainly, as we sit here on Skype. So there are all kinds of interesting things about what they could do with art and the ways they could think about art that we are not completely capable of doing right now. So I think the experiences that you will have with art on Xi'an worlds should be, maybe some of it will be kind of mind-blowing. I hope so. Fingers crossed.

That's a great question. I would say if you're talking about an everyday cook or an everyday truck driver on a Xi'an world who's essentially bilingual, meaning they only speak the proper Xi'an language and then they speak the service dialect, but they haven't had exposure to other alien cultures, there are a lot of things about their language and the way it works phonologically and other things that might make certain other languages challenging for them. But they have the ridiculous advantage over us humans that they live for hundreds of years. So we might give ourselves 18 months or two years or three years to learn a language. They can spend 30 years studying a language without kind of blinking an eye, if you know what I mean. So 30 years applied to learning some other alien language is not a big deal for them. So that means not only can they become extremely fluent in other languages, but they can learn many, many more languages than we can, because even if we're extremely linguistically talented, humans learn 10, 15, maybe 20 languages, but a Xi'an could easily learn 100 languages because they have so much more time to apply themselves to learning it.

That's something that I'm not sure about. That would be a question to ask Dave. We haven't really discussed having a common standard language for everybody to speak. If you ask me, this is just my opinion. This isn't something that we've established in lore as canonical fact. But for me, I think it would make sense for it to have a lot of Banu influence, since the Banu are the species that have contact with literally everyone, and have since, well, they can't remember, because they don't really care about keeping historical records. So I think it would make sense for everybody to have at least some meeting ground speaking Banu to each other. But again, that's just what I think right now off the top of my head, which I think would be good. As far as gameplay purposes are concerned, it's very likely that we'll just lean towards UEE Standard, just for the sake of fun, so that everybody can participate in trading and everybody can communicate with every other alien species. But in my heart of hearts, it's Banu.

I like the Banu so much because I hate writing anything down. But you're all about writing everything down. How do the Banu not just drive you crazy?

They don't really care about historical records, but they like to have a chill time. So I like them.

Yeah, I am not aware of any UEE Esperanto at this point. So that's my only comment on this topic.

They wouldn't really, I mean, they'd be like, oh yeah, my cool uncle, yeah, happy day to him, he rules. But I suppose that they don't really understand our propensity towards emotional exuberance upon first meeting. They just think it's really weird that we act so enthusiastic and really emotionally open when we've just met someone, and even in early subsequent meetings, because in their culture you only really show who you are deep down and what you were feeling about a situation once you've gotten to know someone over a long period of time. And once you get to that point, then they'll let loose with the jokes and they'll tease you and you'll tease them back and forth, or they'll let loose with their opinion on something. But the fact that we do it so easily, it kind of puts them off. They don't really get it.

Yeah, there are certain taboos. One I can remember that's called out in the language document is that if people don't talk about their biological father, don't ever ask. You don't ask someone, who is your biological father? If the biological father is not relevant to the pyahai and they're not there in the picture, you just don't ask about it. I would consider that a taboo.

Yeah, and it's considered very rude to ask anybody about their family lineage. Yeah, of course it's important to my life, but it's like, I don't know, I don't know what I would compare it to in the culture that I'm immersed in.

It's just weird. It's weird in the sense that the lines, the families, the houses are super important to them. I mean, it's kind of like everything, because it determines so many things about your wealth and your potential in life, depending on which house you belong to. But it's considered rude to talk about it. So when you first introduce yourself, you say, I am so-and-so of the so-and-so line and I'm a truck driver for a living. That's what you say. But then you don't talk about your last name. You don't talk about your family name anymore after that first introduction. So that's different. Dwelling on that and asking too many questions about that, or referring to somebody repeatedly as, oh, you're so-and-so of House Twail, and talking about House Twail and this and that about House Twail all the time, that would be taboo. I mean, that would be rude. That would be super, super rude. There would be some odd kind of positioning going on if you were doing that.

Yeah, I guess I would compare it to if you come up to someone and they tell you, oh, I do such and such for a living. You shake their hand: so how much money do you make? And then harping on about that over and over again. I think that's an apt comparison.

Yeah, that would probably be a similar type of taboo. If somebody said, oh, I'm so-and-so and I'm a lawyer at XYZ firm, and they're like, well, what's your compensation? If that were the next question, that would be a similar kind of thing. How much did they pay you to do that there? That would not be good.