#futhork

The Futhork letters here do translate to English, with the letters spelling OBI-WAN and CORUSCANT at the bottom of the right hand screen, but it's really hard to make out what the other planets on this screen are. Some letters can be discerned, but the only ones I can say with confidence are Coruscant, Tatooine, and Geonosis.

This planet, third from left, seems to be _ O _ H _ _

This planet, fourth from left, might read "YAVIN".

The last planet on the screen is very difficult to make out since it is so blurry.

If anyone has any ideas of which planets these might be, feel free to comment. Here is the cipher for Futhork to our Latin alphabet.

I LOVED seeing humans speak something other than Galactic Basic/English in Andor and I want to see more of it!!

Generally, Star Wars does a decent job of showing us alien languages. Which makes sense. Not only are there a variety of different regions/cultures throughout the many planets in the galaxy that would be expected to have unique languages, but also, alien mouths and throats are different from human mouths. Sometimes drastically different. Like Ithorians, who have two mouths!

With humans, though, the majority we see speak basic. And while this makes sense from a storytelling perspective (we as the audience need to understand what the characters are saying), it doesn’t make sense from within the story.

There are a LOT of humans in the galaxy, spread out over thousands of planets. I don’t believe for a second that every human on every planet is a native galactic basic speaker. Even if humans all came from one basic-speaking region and colonized/spread themselves out across the galaxy from that point, the language wouldn’t have stayed the same. Over the years, languages take on new words and accents from other languages. Slang develops and gradually becomes actual words. Grammar structures and words and tones and sounds evolve and adjust according to terrain and culture and so many other areas of life.

So with the vast number of planets in Star Wars + how long humans have lived there…thousands of dialects should have developed. Not just for aliens, but for humans, too.

And I wish they would show us this more often in Star Wars media. Yeah, there are some cool Wookiepedia articles about Star Wars species and their languages, but I want to see it appreciated on the screen.

We do hear a variety of different accents in Star Wars, which had to come from somewhere. So maybe this suggests that some humans (and aliens) have a native language and learned basic at school or later in life, like Cassian did. It seems like this is the case with the Twi’leks as well. And then you get cases like the Gungans who have developed their own dialect, which allows them to communicate with basic-speakers but clearly has some different grammar and pronunciation (perhaps due to Gungan mouth/face structure and the need to speak underwater/in high humidity).

If this is the case, though, and a bunch of our favorite characters are bi/tri/multilingual, can we please see little snippets and flashbacks, like we saw in Andor, of characters’ native languages? Or have characters make little references to their native languages, or languages spoken on their home planets? Or see written languages other than Aurebesh?

Side note: I also love seeing the written Mando’a in the Mandalorian. How cool would it be if we could see little details like that more often— Geonosian written on ships made by Geonosians and Futhork translations on a restaurant sign because the owner is from Naboo?

Anglo-Saxon Futhorc Runes

I made a thing!

So I’m in the SCA and I do a lot of award scrolls for people. I recently got an assignment for a guy with a Viking persona who is known for his historical accuracy and I thought it would be fun to do a Runestone instead of a traditional illuminated page.

The text is English transliterated into Medieval Runes/Futhork because it was easier for me to wrap my head around at the time. It’s all hand carved into a slab of soapstone.

Also I’m aware there are some mistakes. No I’m not interested in corrections. I was in the middle of a bad bout of insomnia at the time and hadn’t had more than like five hours of sleep in the previous three days (Did I mention I did this in a day?)

I promised in an earlier post to explain why I believe that the Naboo are descendent of two cultures specifically. As indicated above, it has to do with observations of the portrayal of their language both written and spoken.

Firstly, in the Clone Wars series, Padme serves some wine from Naboo which has a picture of Varykino and the words “Domaine de la Maison sur le Lac”  are on the bottle. This is French. Does that mean that the Nabooan language is French the same way Basic is English? Well...no.

Why?

Consonants.

Yes. French has no “th” sound, and yet the capital city of Naboo is called Theed. Furthermore, Padme’s grandmother’s last name is Thule. Clearly, the Nabooan language is derived from French but is not pure French.

Where did the TH come from then?

Well, their alphabets are called “Futhark” and “Futhork,” (another couple th sounds incidentally...), which is a reference to Old Norse...also not French. Now, the written language looks nothing like our Futhark, but in distant Wild Space there are planets that use runes like exist in this galaxy so clearly there are Viking like cultures over in GFFA who could have influenced the Nabooan language, alphabet, and culture giving us those words.

As I considered this, I discovered a planet called Thule. Thule, in our world, is associated with Iceland. Thule is also Padme’s grandmother’s last name.

Coincidence! I think not! (Well probably...)

However, I believe, that this indicates that the Naboo, who are descendants from Grizmallt, joined forces with some Thulians and together colonized a new planet. (For further details see my post “A Brief Overview of the Colonization of Naboo.)The resultant language, culture, mythology, and orthography, being a fusion of these two cultures, with Grizmalltian influence being the dominant factor.

No language or culture is entirely independent of other influences though, so there will also be some minor Basic, Huttese, and even Gungan influences.