#dariocantu

Only marginally related, unfortunately, since my knowledge of Nahuatl is seriously limited.

I’m writing a story (which you can read here if you want) based in the universe of Starbound, a video game about space travel, which has some bird people whose dress and culture bear a superficial resemblance to the Aztec Empire. The game itself uses kind of a dog-Latin version of Nahuatl for a lot of its names (at least to my knowledge–I’m not sure how many of the words I see are actually words in Nahuatl, if any).

My recent post was an answer to why the naming conventions in my story are different from those in the game. Basically: I’m not a huge fan of using Nahuatl-ish non-words, but I don’t know enough Nahuatl to insert a lot of it into the story, nor do I think it would be terribly appropriate or necessary to do so when the entire thing is supposedly being translated into English from an alien birdpeople language anyway.

I’m trying to stay reasonably true to the lore of the game without straying into “other cultures but IN SPACE” tropes that often plague science fiction writing. Unfortunately it’s sometimes a difficult balancing act between referencing Mesoamerican culture/history carefully and pushing certain aspects of the story away from the history, because it’s actually about fictional people in space.

13. choose a Slavic (eastern European) language you’d like to learn

I read more about it and apparently Maltese is listed under “Arabic-based Creole languages” on Wikipedia but I don’t know how accurate it is.

I think French is super overrated, especially because people often deride people for learning/speaking German and say “French is so much prettier” which is like ugh it’s so influenced by anti-German sentiment accrued in the World Wars and French has SUCH A SIMILAR PHONETIC INVENTORY. It’s also got an academy which automatically makes it lesser to me because people use that as evidence of it being a more proper and fancy language. blech