sith third-person pronouns
So, can we agree that SWTOR acting like the Republic and the Empire both have Republic Basic as their primary language is the result of the translation convention and not because anyone in the Empire outside the territories it conquered during the Great Galactic War actually speaks Basic as a first language? Because the Republic has only had three relatively brief periods of interaction with the Sith worlds spread over thousands of years, and the interaction was mostly them killing each other.
The official language of the Sith Empire is the official standard dialect of the official standard language which Republic linguists usually call Modern Sith. I have given it the very imaginative name of Imperial Standard. Imperial Standard does not have gendered third-person pronouns like English does but some other members of the large family of Modern Sith languages do, mostly the planetary languages of the ancient Ratakan slave colonies where the Stygian Caldera’s Twi’lek population originates.
Imperial Standard has three singular third-person pronouns reflecting a person’s stage of life and the socially appropriate level of respect due to them.
Minors (che): traditionally used for people who have yet to pass their Trials of Adulthood but in the modern Empire is generally only used for people below the age of majority. A notable exception is that in the Sith Academies it is still commonly used for Acolytes who haven’t completed the Trials irrespective of age.
Adults (vhe): for living people above the age of majority. The legal age of majority is higher in the Empire than it is in the Republic, coming at the beginning of a person’s ninth year of life (eight Korribani years, about twenty standard years). This is assumed to be a flow on from the culture of the longer-lived red sith to the rest of the Imperial population.
Ancestors (dze): the most respectful pronoun is reserved for the dead and, in Vitiate’s Empire, the Emperor. It would have been considered vaguely blasphemous to use it for a living person in earlier eras, though the first Sith Lords – the twelve Jedi Exiles – insisted their followers use it when speaking of them.
While I use che/vhe/dze for the pronouns this is part of the translation convention. I’m not good enough with conlangs to come up with plausible word forms and deviating from the English vhe/vher/vhir/vhirs pattern would make it more difficult for a reader to tell that they’re dealing with pronouns and not, for example, somebody’s name.
There are also three plural third-person pronouns in Imperial Standard, also tiered as minors, adults and ancestors. When speaking about mixed groups you use the level of appropriate for the highest ranked person in the group. Luckily for me all three pronouns translate into English as ‘they’.
The pronouns a person uses for slaves and droids reveals a lot about that person’s views on slavery and droid rights.
