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 Post subject: Making Sense of Languages
PostPosted: Fri May 19, 2017 10:57 pm 
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We all know that the linguistic side of the L5R design is based on things that have sounded coolly Oriental enough to be included, with spelling and phonetic conventions of real Asiatic languages followed with hit and miss frequency. But that's a meta-level explanation: designers didn't care too much for coherence and consistency in inspiration, why should we? Still the majority of what means Rokugani language is borrowed from Japanese, with occasional inclusions of Chinese, Korean or Thai names and categories, or just phonemes. As long as we consider Rokugan as broadly representative of various Asian influences, a continent in itself, that works, to an extent.

However, in this setting, we: a) open up the world and suddenly linguistic diversity and linguistic distinctions start to matter a lot more; b) we play in times when Rokugan is still relatively young and the various influences that have led to development of 12th-century Rokugani are more profoundly visible as distinct; c) the early restoration of the Unicorn to Rokugani playability needs more elaboration because they have both preserved the traditions of the 1st-century Rokugani before it was remade by Lady Doji, her son Nio, Kakita Kiyamori and the following entrepreneurs of culture who consolidated Rokugani language. Hence, by applying some knowledge on how the Asiatic languages relate to one another in a real world to the existing canon material and material added to this setting I am going to develop a more coherent story of Rokugani language to give a better idea of what it's like.

1. Rokugani written language, introduced in 1st century (not before!) is based on characters. It's known, but its consequences are not often realised: the signature sign may have many readings which do not resemble one another phonetically even though they mean the same because of one graphic representation.

2. Rokugani language is in High and Common variants. While High, used in Imperial Court, has remained largely consistent, uniform and less evolving over those several hundred years, the Common one, widely used, has greater vernacular richness and fluidity, sprouting dialects, specific regional vocabularies, and changing over time. It's more ecclectic and adaptable. Spoken language influences written one, making some characters simplified or even obsolete and forgotten.

3. Before the Kami fell into Ningen-do, the human barbarian tribes inhabiting Rokugan had spoken languages, and probably had oral traditions to record their heritage through them. Whether they had developed literacy in any form as well is debatable, though possible. Representing phenomena through pictograms has been something tribal communities across our world often developed on their own, though most likely it didn't amount to a uniform system. Still, characters are what pictograms evolved into. The abstract strokes forming them could have started from pictures.

4. What was that Dawn of the Empire language like, the one spoken by the Tribe of Isawa, the Noriaki, by Lady Seppun? The answer can be inferred easily from what language we have for those who didn't let be ruled by the Kami - the Yobanjin. And their language is very much Chinese-like, as evidenced by their geographic names.

5. Hence, the language of gods must have differed significantly from the language of the people they were about to govern. This is why Lady Doji & Co. had so much to do about it. That required both educating their subjects to communicate in their preferred language as well as developing a consistent writing system that could make it possible, and to foster literary traditions in culture that could facilitate its spread and wide use.

6. The Dawn of the Empire linguistic situation could be conceived as Japanese-speaking gods imposing their language and culture over a population speaking other East Asian languages by means of developing and perfecting characters that had meaning expressible in both, with the aim of slow and gradual substitution of the prior language with the language of the celestial masters. For the tribal elites becoming samurai it must have been an act of confirming their status to shed old barbarian traditions (and language) and prove themselves as 'new people', better than the working masses that would end up as heimin.

7. This would mean that the replacement of one language with the other could not have gone wholesale. And this would explain why those Chinese names and phonemes are still prevalent in the Rokugani language, as well as the differences between the High and Common variants of Rokugani, the latter preserving more Chinese traditions than the former. This would explain:

a) Persistence of names like Jin, Chen, Chang, Mei etc. among the bonge, non-samurai monks and heimin alike.
b) Presence of odd-sounding or hybrid names on the fringes of Rokugani civilisation, like among the Dragon (Kaelung, Shaitung) or the Crab (Atarasi).
c) Presence of Chinese names among returned spirits from the Dawn era (Akodo Quehao, Matsu Daoquan), or picked to honour the early ancestry that used that name among the Lion who make a point in remembering them

8. That also gives a plausible explanation for the odd man out there. While all the other Kami have names recorded in what amounts to Japanese, the Lucky Dragon is Fu Leng, not for instance Furyu. This may have been a conscious PR stunt during the First War to construct his image as an 'evil savage other' and leave him with a name in barbarian language. It may have been something he himself picked up to indicate his distinctness.

9. For those who are literary, however, in the next centuries what's available is characters and their contemporary readings, not how they were spoken centuries back. Characters are not letters with ascribed sound. Aside from some naming conventions passed by oral traditions (Fu Leng) old phonetics become lost in time. By Sixth Century most of educated Rokugani (as opposed to uneducated heimin masses) speak and write and imagine language how Lady Doji wanted them to, though in diluted and ecclectic forms and with caveats representing regional diversity. While the samurai and to an extent monks as well get a literary education, language of the heimin is probably a total mess, a mixture of Japanese and Chinese that is only partially comprehensible to the ruling classes and another reason to consider it a gibberish of half-human inferiors.

10. It would also mean that how things got recorded and how they were written down wasn't necessarily the same how they were spoken. The Tao was recorded by Kami Shiba, not written down by Shinsei himself, nor were the Sutras, the integrity of which can be questioned as they have been rewritten across centuries. Shinsei was more a pseudonym that a real name as we know other cultures knew him by the name Mekhem. We can't tell what language he actually spoke. The names of ancient tribes and their members are available mostly courtesy to Ikoma records. It's convenient to assume they've always been spelled that way, but for the masters of correcting history it may have been yet another way to strengthen the one true story that reinforced one true legitimacy. Matsu could well have been Mazu when she joined the Lion.

11. This compounded nature of Rokugani language is actually reflected in the Japanese language itself. With the adoption of Chinese writing system the Japanese had a huge headache ever since roughly Asuka/Nara period to actually make their non-Sinic language work with Sinic way of recording it. Hence we have onyomi and kunyomi, Chinese and Japanese readings of characters, respectively, and kana to compensate for the divergences. The above explanation could explain how this hybrid was formed in Rokugani conditions.

12. This brings us home with the question what language the Unicorn speak. How Rokugani is it? The answer would be - not much, by 6th-century standards. The moment Shinjo departed with her acquired followers Lady Doji didn't have language her way yet. And Shinjo was a sucker for indigenisation, so she was likely to have slipped into being referred more like Xinzhou by her followers, with them calling themselves something like Erdakou (Otaku), Yi De (Ide), Yuezhi (Iuchi). Culturally, the Ki-Rin were little more linguistically than Yobanjin are right now, just with some silver lining of crash course in the language of gods. But that got quickly challenged by their time in the steppes and integration with the Moto (Matou?).

13. So what was the language of the Ujik-hai? Mongol, most likely, though probably not exclusively. As among the Unicorn, there is a prevalence of Chinese names among the Moto, and their original gods were called Shi-tien Yen-wang, so it's unlikely to have come with the Ki-Rin alone. Ujik-hai were much older than Rokugan, so they must have been interfering with Chinese-speaking populations of Rokugan before the Kami fell. We could probably include other Altaic/Tungusic languages into Ujik-hai/Yobanjin mix, like Manchu, Jurchen etc. While the origins of the Korean language is still debated, it's heavily influenced by both Tungusic and Sinic languages, so its speakers in Rokugan would probably be somewhere there, beyond the northern mountains. There's Shinjo Hwarang and others after all.

14. So what do the Unicorn speak like in 6th century? Nothing a regular Rokugani can understand beyond cherry-picking a bit of oddly similar vocabulary, mostly related to religion and samurai attributes. Their language has never been Rokugani in modern sense, and half-millennium of its independent development has led to something no Rokugani would linguistically recognise. Understanding a Yobanjin would probably be easier. Well, unless you can sit down with a member of Suio vassal family of the Ide who are tasked with maintaining sophisticated multilingualism, then you could probably figure things out after a time, mostly because the other side is open-minded and learning quickly. Either way, it'll be a shock.

15. There's an odd question of weird appearance of Thai names among the Scorpion, like Kwanchai or Norachai. It may well have been that southern and northern Rokugan were ethnically and linguistically different then during the pre-Dawn times. The north had contact with the steppe, and this is where they mostly fled if they didn't want to bend knees to the Kami. This kind of north-south diversity because of geographical barriers in not unlike Chinese mainland. Before the great exodus of Han Chinese south of Yangtze after the conquest of the north by Tungusic peoples the south of China had been inhabited by what is now Southeast Asian peoples, Thai included. Neither of the Scorpion family leaders emerged from local tribal leaders, Shosuro-Soshi being a specific case and Yogo coming from the north, so it's not unlikely some of their samurai and many heimin emerged from local context that was a bit less Sinic in the Yobanjin sense but did not make an imprint on Clan-level naming conventions. Hiruma's daughter was Mai which is as good a Thai name as it is a Japanese one. This trace may be totally ignored unless someone looks for a Thai feel to their Rokugani character. The south was also in greater proximity to ancient civilisations, most notably the Naga, though whether there was any contact is hard to tell.



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