I've thinking about the Cardassian script as shown on screen and in beta canon and such and like. Is it just me or would it be very difficult to write by hand?? Like.
I traced some of this image for a recent drawing I did and like. The varying line thicknesses?? The little rectangular holes?? It's not at all intuitive to write by hand. Even if you imagine, like, a different writing implement—I suppose a chisel-tip pen would work better—it still seems like it wasn't meant to be handwritten. Which has a few possible explanations.
Like, maybe it's just a fancy font for computers, and handwritten text looks a little different. Times New Roman isn't very easily written by hand either, right? Maybe the line thickness differences are just decorative, and it's totally possible to convey the same orthographic information with the two line thicknesses of a chisel-tip pen, or with no variation in line thickness at all.
A more interesting explanation, though, and the one I thought of first, is that this writing system was never designed to be handwritten. This is a writing system developed in Cardassia's digital age. Maybe the original Cardassian script didn’t digitize well, so they invented a new one specifically for digital use? Like, when they invented coding, they realized that their writing system didn’t work very well for that purpose. I know next to nothing about coding, but I cannot imagine doing it using Chinese characters. So maybe they came up with a new writing system that worked well for that purpose, and when computer use became widespread, they stuck with it.
Or maybe the script was invented for political reasons! Maybe Cardassia was already fairly technologically advanced when the Cardassian Union was formed, and, to reinforce a cohesive national identity, they developed a new standardized national writing system. Like, y'know, the First Emperor of Qin standardizing hanzi when he unified China, or that Korean king inventing hangul. Except that at this point in Cardassian history, all official records were digital and typing was a lot more common than handwriting, so the new script was designed to be typed and not written. Of course, this reform would be slower to reach the more rural parts of Cardassia, and even in a technologically advanced society, there are people who don't have access to that technology. But I imagine the government would be big on infrastructure and education, and would make sure all good Cardassian citizens become literate. And old regional scripts would stop being taught in schools and be phased out of digital use and all the kids would grow up learning the digital script.
Which is good for the totalitarian government! Imagine you can only write digitally. On computers. That the government can monitor. If you, like, write a physical letter and send it to someone, then it's possible for the contents to stay totally private. But if you send an email, it can be very easily intercepted. Especially if the government is controlling which computers can be manufactured and sold, and what software is in widespread use, etc.
AND. Historical documents are now only readable for scholars. Remember that Korean king that invented hangul? Before him, Korea used to use Chinese characters too. And don't get me wrong, hangul is a genius writing system! It fits the Korean language so much better than Chinese characters did! It increased literacy at incredible rates! But by switching writing systems, they broke that historical link. The average literate Chinese person can read texts that are thousands of years old. The average literate Korean person can't. They'd have to specifically study that field, learn a whole new writing system. So with the new generation of Cardassian youths unable to read historical texts, it's much easier for the government to revise history. The primary source documents are in a script that most people can't read. You just trust the translation they teach you in school. In ASIT it's literally a crucial plot point that the Cardassian government revised history! Wouldn't it make it soooo much easier for them if only very few people can actually read the historical accounts of what happened.
I guess I am thinking of this like Chinese characters. Like, all the different Chinese "dialects" being written with hanzi, even though otherwise they could barely be considered the same language. And even non-Sinitic languages that historically adopted hanzi, like Japanese and Korean and Vietnamese. Which worked because hanzi is a logography—it encodes meaning, not sound, so the same word in different languages can be written the same. It didn’t work well! Nowadays, Japanese has made significant modifications and Korean has invented a new writing system entirely and Vietnamese has adapted a different foreign writing system, because while hanzi could write their languages, it didn’t do a very good job at it. But the Cardassian government probably cares more about assimilation and national unity than making things easier for speakers of minority languages. So, Cardassia used to have different cultures with different languages, like the Hebitians, and maybe instead of the Union forcing everyone to start speaking the same language, they just made everyone use the same writing system. Though that does seem less likely than them enforcing a standard language like the Federation does. Maybe they enforce a standard language, and invent the new writing system to increase literacy for people who are newly learning it.
And I can imagine it being a kind of purely digital language for some people? Like if you’re living on a colonized planet lightyears away from Cardassia Prime and you never have to speak Cardassian, but your computer’s interface is in Cardassian and if you go online then everyone there uses Cardassian. Like people irl who participate in the anglophone internet but don’t really use English in person because they don’t live in an anglophone country. Except if English were a logographic writing system that you could use to write your own language. And you can’t handwrite it, if for whatever reason you wanted to. Almost a similar idea to a liturgical language? Like, it’s only used in specific contexts and not really in daily life. In daily life you’d still speak your own language, and maybe even handwrite it when needed. I think old writing systems would survive even closer to the imperial core (does it make sense to call it that?), though the government would discourage it. I imagine there’d be a revival movement after the Fire, not only because of the cultural shift away from the old totalitarian Cardassia, but because people realize the importance of having a written communication system that doesn’t rely on everyone having a padd and electricity and wifi.
okay so the trend of people painting the people they dont like as mentally ill is more prevalent than i thought. maybe there should be a term for this because i like to think of it as "concern trolling" (due to the fact that people feel entitled to label others as mentally ill because OF COURSE THEY dont hate mentally ill people, so by virtue of calling others mentally ill they magically dont hate those people anymore)
but im aware the term "concern trolling" is used in a broadly different context. so by my logic maybe i can call it "malicious pity"? a fitting oxymoron, i suppose, for the oxymorons (not implying theyre stupid, just self-contradictory) that wield it. the hallmark of this tactic is that it reaffirms ableism by positioning the powerful and strong as also morally good, which, blah, boring, but i guess i couldnt expect better
New development on my amateur linguistics research:
Mexican Spanish (at least the regional variety of my city, I don't go out much) tends to have a different way of saying "you are welcome." Which is to say: we don't say it, not all the time.
The Spanish equivalent is "De nada" (it's nothing). So a typical conversation would be like,
"Gracias" (thank you)
"De nada" (you are welcome)
However, I have come to realize it usually goes:
"Gracias" (thank you)
"Gracias a ti" (thank you too)
You mutually thank each other. Not always, I think that when you are doing something physical (reaching a high shelf, for example) you *do* say "De nada." However, when you buy something, or lend something, the thanks goes both ways. I assume the implied message it's something like this:
"Thank you [for lending me your pencil]"
"Thank you too [for turning it back]"
And a second example:
"Thank you [for taking my order]"
"Thank you too [for choosing our restaurant]"
I think this is interesting. Why? Because I'm a nerd.
Something that is extremely funny to me is that in Spanish "Strider" can be translated as "Zancudo" but they used the word Trancos in the official translation because Zancudo is also a way to call mosquitoes. Like ah yes my favourite Lord of the Rings character, Mosquito.
im actually really enjoying playing genshin w the english voiceover because its fun to hear how the english voice actors pronounce words that are not intuitive to them! something really interesting that happens when ‘snezhnaya’ is used is that a lot of the english voice actors do a sound alternation that would NEVER happen with native russian speakers:
snezhnaya in russian is actually pronounced ‘SNE-zhna-ya’ ([sné.ʒnə.ja] for those familiar with ipa) with emphasis on the first syllable, with a clean [s] at the beginning, and with the ‘zh’ being pronounced like the ‘j’ sound in french [ʒ]. both of these sounds are really similar - they are identical except for two factors.
1. the [s] is voiceless, meaning the vocal folds do not vibrate when producing it. (you can check this by placing your hand gently over your throat and just producing and holding a [s], like in the word ‘sit.’) the french ‘j’ sound is voiced, meaning your vocal folds do vibrate when producing it, and you can test it the same way.
2. the french ‘j’ sound [ʒ] is palatalized, which basically means the back of your tongue is slightly raised. [s] is not palatalized. the ‘palatalized version’ of [s] would be the ‘sh’ sound [ʃ] like in ‘shoe,’ and the ‘non-palatalized version of the [ʒ] sound would be [z] like in ‘zebra.’
what a lot of the english voice actors do is switch the [s] and [ʒ] sounds to their ‘opposite’ counterparts, so SNE-zhna-ya [sné.ʒnə.ja] actually ends up being pronounced SHNE-zna-ya [ʃné.znə.ja]. also, all of the english voice actors put the stress on the second syllable rather than the first, so the ‘final’ pronunciation actually sounds more like shne-ZNA-ya which is… almost incomprehensible to native russian speakers unfortunately, but still really cool to hear happen!
WAIT okay I don't know how to word this at all but basically the way we perceive speech sounds is through like. different frequencies are amplified or dampened by the ways we shape our vocal tract and we hear those differences in like which frequencies are louder and which frequencies are quieter and that's how we recognize different phonemes. or something. so if like aliens have a different hearing range and/or differently shaped vocal tracts they could have an entirely different phonemic inventory than human languages??? like shrimp colors but it's alien phonemes???? this might seem like a really obvious realization but like those guys could be distinguishing vowels based on formants we can't even perceive!! their hearing range could start above 5000 hz and they wouldn't be able to hear the difference between any of our vowels!! enough with giving klingon uvular plosives or whatever to make it sound ""exotic"" that shit should be UNPRODUCIBLE with a human vocal tract and UNPERCEIVABLE with human ears!! no wonder they need universal translators when your ears could be physically unable to distinguish between alien phonemes??? sorry I'm realizing that this really is an incredibly obvious thought just couched in overly technical language but I'm excited about it nonetheless. spock's surname is unpronounceable bc it's got a bunch of consonant clusters? NO it actually has secret vulcan phonemes distinguished by differences in frequencies above the human range of hearing so u can't even perceive it correctly let alone pronounce it. cardassians have a hearing range significantly smaller than humans so they physically cannot understand most human languages...
