#wsperat

Close?! I don’t think so!

Man the ship! *Hombrea el bote!

I’m a root beer man. ??Soy un root beer hombre/un hombre de root beer.

How many men (lives in a video game) do you have? ?¿Cuántos hombres tienes?

Man, I’m tired! *¡Hombre, estoy cansado!

Nah, if you want to find words that are used almost the same in every language, you have to go way in the other direction. I’m talking words like “caesium” and “interdimensional”—words whose meanings are so specific and so specialized that they’re unlikely to be used in any other context than their literal context. (E.g. how many idioms do you know involving caesium?)

To answer your question, yes, of course—and so are you, by default. Every single word in every single language covers a range, even if that range is too trivial to note. If it didn’t, each word would apply to one and only thing throughout the history of time, and it would be impossible to generalize. When you create a word, you’re creating (most likely) its initial range, and its initial range may be small. But as you use the word, you expand its range. Sometimes the expansion is so great and so non-obvious that the new expansion has to be listed as a separate definition in the dictionary. Even if the expansion makes sense, you’ll often have to list it. For example, adere in High Valyrian means “slippery”. It also means “fast”. I think it’s pretty obvious how you got from the first one (the initial one) to the second one. Nevertheless, this is nothing that anyone would assume by default. Thus, if you’re making a useful dictionary, you have to list that as a secondary meaning.

I honestly haven’t looked into it. Frankly, I’m shocked language didn’t develop in the course of a single person’s life. Then again, looking back on technological advancement, I’m constantly surprised that certain technologies lasted as long as they did with no one getting on to the next thing in, like, four or five years. It’s hard to imagine what it would be like without having all one’s modern assumptions at one’s disposal.

When I’m working on a show or movie, it’s an active project, and I work on that exclusively. When I have no active project, I work on whatever I happen to want to work on at the time. That includes every language I’ve ever created. At this stage, what are the languages of Defiance other than personal projects (since Trion can’t be bother to give a single shit about the languages I created)? They’re all my own conlangs; I was just paid to create some of them and given a few extra constraints.

Also, now that I’ve been running my own D&D campaign, I’ve been working with languages I’ve created in the past that I’m using for the campaign—specifically, Bodzvokhan and Övüsi from Bright (figured in case I get to work on the sequel, it’d only help to beef up the vocab of each); Shiväisith from Thor: The Dark World; and Gweydr, one of my old ones. The latter is just awful. It needs so much work to be respectable. And the font is an abomination. I really want to rework it, but it’s really not a good use of my time (Gweydr is simply a naming language, since it’s the language that everyone speaks. Consequently, you don’t hear it—it’s just English—but if there are decorative signs, etc. that players don’t need to read, they’ll be in the Gweydry script).