dae

I remember there were a few episodes of DS9 that talked about “Ancient Bajoran” which modern Bajoran descended from and I love that idea for the history of language on Bajor, but there should be tons of different languages descended from a language that old! Maybe an old form survives as a liturgical language while another somewhat related language is the primary dialect spoken in, say, the Rakantha Province. Maybe there are different branches of languages descended from Ancient Bajoran that are mutually unintelligible to each other but that can be traced back by scholars to a common ancestor. And certainly there must be other language families on Bajor for which no link to Ancient Bajoran can be established at all. How have Bajoran religious and governmental authorities historically treated these languages? How many small languages might have been wiped out or become endangered during the Cardassian occupation? What kinds of language revitalization efforts might exist after the end of the occupation? To think about any of this stuff you just kind of have to ignore canon, though.

And the reason why they have trouble translating actual material from that temple in that one episode which has the language transcribed is that the written-aspect of the language was not wholly preserved: maybe there's an alphabet used specifically to capture the particular language of the communications coming from the wormhole but its encoding is lost so translation is extra fraught.

my sasha fic is coming along. slowly. but it's going somewhere.

ziyallllll

Charles Rosen - "Icebound River" (c.1915)