Murderbot worldbuild noodles: language history and Mihira & New Tideland Thailand
in nullverse I basically conceptualize Mihira and New Tideland to be close-knit sister systems. or possibly intertwined polities in the same system, I haven’t totally decided. Mihira station has a founder population that was proportionally high in people descended from the slavic and east slavic/northeast asia area of our current world (say like, half of the founders), drawing back from space-cultural influence of the Rocosmos in the early days of spacefaring.
sidenote. Cyrillic script is fairly common in the corporate rim; it was one of the big 5 scripts that everything was cross-written in during the early expansion age, most often used for Russian but a few others too. feed infrastructure always supports Cyrillic, with very few exceptions.
The big 5: Latin, Hanzi, Devanagari, Telugu, Cyrillic. The original languages that use these scripts (and which look just like the languages we would recognize today on Earth) are sometimes referred to as “the pre-corporation rim languages.” There’s obviously lots of others, and in many places the original languages and scripts have evolved into new forms, but the 5 are omnipresent and baked into the technology even in places where none of them are used, just sitting around as a dusty linguistic bedrock database.
so anyway my random thought that jogged me to write this all down: New Tideland as a bastardized respelling of “New Thailand.” I’m thinking that New Tideland has a strong Thai connection. And is in possession of one of the largest populations of L1 New Thai speakers in the universe.
New Thai is a lot like old Thai, but it has a shit ton of new loanwords: lots of duplication and mix of vocabulary from multiple languages, which gives it an interesting register flexibility. Before New Tideland won its independence, the little-documented Thai script was used by workers in handwriting to organize. Nowadays New Thai is very well-documented, and many decent translation modules exist. The documentation and dissemination of New Thai was pretty controversial for a while, but in the end people like being able to write and autotranslate their feedmails, whatever the historical weight of a “secret”/overlooked revolutionary language.
