#treespeak

So, chutespeak (later treespeak) was developed in Le-Metru, according to Defilak, and then spread out from there. Lesovik doesn't use chutespeak, which tells us that it wasn't always a thing from the start of the MU.

Now, what would cause such a dialect to pop up like this, when no others have, in Metru Nui or otherwise?

To that, I say: Diner Lingo.

For those unfamiliar, its american verbal slang used by wait staff in diners or diner-style restaurants to quickly communicate orders to the cooks.

You want a well-done burger? Waiter says 'burn it'.

Want a lot of toppings and condiments? 'Dragged through the garden'.

Want your coffee black? Your coffee is called 'high and dry'.

(It varies from place to place, but these are just some overall examples.)

Back to chutespeak, Le-Metru was a hub of transport and delivery. It's incredibly fast-paced and the need to communicate just as quickly is a must.

I hate writing it, but it's fun to think about. It's a whole dialect specific to Le-Matoran in one part of one island in the entire Matoran universe.

Presumably it's meant to speed up communication and simplify things between Chute operators?

So it makes little sense to just throw in a weird compound word in the middle of an otherwise normal sentence. Unless it's translated for the readers, or toned down for other people's benefit.

So essentially, I think there's levels to treespeak, and Le-Matoran codeswitch between them depending on time, place, and who they're talking to.

Level 0: Standard Matoric.

Level 1: Mostoften normal sentences with somefew compound words thrown in flavorwise. This is what we readhear in the books, or speaktalk to other matoran.

Level 2: Shortsmaller sentences, with muchgreat wordjoining. You speakuse prounouns and prepositions whereplace clearneeded, likeways conjunctions. Le-Matoran speaktalk samewise when restcalm or worknot.

Short answer: not really. I would be surprised if that much intentional thought was put into it, especially basing it on specific varieties of English. Part of the reason for this is that Treespeak, as presented in Bionicle source materials, isn't all that complex or different from "typical" English. There are a couple of main properties:

(1) Special elaborated vocabulary. Sometimes expressions in Treespeak/Chutespeak are just elaborated forms of a single English word. So, for example, "bad-worse" and "bad-wrong" are really just used to mean "worse" and "wrong", but in a more elaborated way. We could, of course, interpret these as "intensified" forms, which is what I have done in the Matoric model of Treespeak/Chutespeak. Same for expressions with "ever-", "all-", and "quick-".

In other cases, elaborated forms just provide a bit more color to an expression, like "crash-wreck" which basically means "crash" and "wreck" together or "crave-need", "rapid-quick", "terrible-bad", "seek-find". Similarly, a lot of Treespeak expressions are just simple combinations of adjective+noun that have been "fused" together into a single word: "bald-land", "clash-time", "dark-plant", "loud-talk", etc.

There are a couple of cases where individual words are derived as something similar to a "kenning" (a poetic term referring to a compound of words which refers to another word metaphorically, such as using the expression "whale-road" for "ocean" in Old English poetry). These include "bog-foot" which means "slow (person)", maybe "old-bone" ("dead") and also maybe "cling-twiner" to refer to a vine.

Other times, expressions utilize options in English syntax that are a bit less common. The term "air-breathe" is one of these--it would generally be classified as a compound verb or an "incorporated object" expression. It's equivalent to "breathe air", as in the sentence "I breathe air", but the object "air" has been prefixed to the verb "breathe": "I air-breathe". You can also make nouns this way by adding a suffix like -ing: "[ Air-breathing ] is great!" which means basically the same as "[ Breathing air ] is great!" Other cases like this are "order-giving" and "order-taking" and maybe "vine-swing" ("swing on a vine") and "ground-walk" ("walk on the ground"). A similar construction incorporates an adverbial element instead of an object, yielding "quick-soar" from "soar quickly", "quick-walk" from "walk quickly", etc.

(2) "Clipped" syntax. Probably the most notable aspect of early Treespeak lines in, say, MNOG is that they are "missing" specific words. Look at the following line by Kongu:

"Traveler beware – darktime come. Matau stolen, Lewa gone! Le-Koronans prepare for battleflight!"

Part of what makes this particularly "Treespeaky" is that Kongu is eliding all the auxiliary verbs and maybe an article or two.

"Traveler beware – (a/the?) darktime has come. Matau is/has been stolen, Lewa is gone! (?The) Le-Koronans prepare for battleflight!"

You can see this in a bunch of his other lines, as well as elision of some other things like subject pronouns and some other elements, as well as a heavy use of apposition:

"Kongu (is the) fastest Leaf-Runner!"

"In lifedawn years past, (he) was known (as) Matau Kewa Champion!"

"Lewa, (?is the) great Toa of Air! (?The) Hero of Le-Koro! (He has) Gone away in quest for the Great Kanohi."

"Uptree, (there is) battle, downtree (there is) peace!"

(Speaks a tree in Elif Shafak's The Island of Missing Trees)