etaoin arieu’t
Most of the time I use vulgarlang to generate languages, since I can stay phonologically consistent across a culture while being ratshit at making up words. Staring at its blessedly low-effort output, I got curious about Mando’a, one of Star Wars’ most famous conlangs. The easiest thing to do seemed to be to grab the list of words from mandoa.org, so I did. After scrubbing it a bit for punctuation marks - not the comma - I ran it through a couple of analysis tools to see how it’s different from English, and what other characteristics it might have. If anyone’s got any longer Mando’a texts, please flick me a link even if it contains user invented words. I’d be interested to see how different they are.
The first thing was a frequency analysis. For instance, in a plain English text, 12.7% of all letters will be an E, while very few will be an X. In Mando’a, 17.14% of all letters will be an A, and very few will be a W.
The twelve most frequent letters in English, in order, are: ETAOIN SHRDLU. In Mando’a, they’re ARIEU‘T ONSLY. Until now, I hadn’t noticed that Traviss’s Mando’a doesn’t actually contain an F, and I think but can’t find a reference for, that she said Fett is derived from vhett, meaning farmer. Mando’a has no Z either, which could be a nice bit of world-building regarding Satine Kryze perhaps coming from another population altogether (like the Norman French after 1066) but almost certainly isn’t. There are also no letters for X or Q.
After that, I did a sliding bigram analysis. This scans through the text looking for which two letters are most likely to appear next to each other. In English, the six most common are TH, HE, IN, ER, AN and RE. Interestingly, for a language created by someone called Karen, Mando’a has AR, IR, AA, RA, KA, and AN.
K itself is nearly seven times more likely to appear in Mando’a than it is in English. People do tend to prefer the letters in their name over other letters in the alphabet, so this isn’t quite as egotistical as you might assume. It’s the thirteenth most common letter in Mando’a, half way down the frequency list.
Even though the letters don’t appear in written Mando’a, the sounds for F, Q, X, and Z might be present in spoken Mando’a. However, I tend to headcanon them as too pragmatic to put up with an orthography as horrifying as English’s, so for me this now means that someone with a heavy Mando accent would curse vhiervhek about the vhekking banta vhodder. That’s not a typo in bantha; Mando’a is missing TH as a bigram and presumably as a phoneme as well.
I have no idea why she chose these letters to leave out while leaving the rhotics in. F itself occurs about 2.2% of the time in English, the 15th most common letter, but the bigram VH that she implies replaced it is only the 171st most frequent one in Mando’a, showing up 0.16% of the time. Odd, since it’s in the name belonging to the most famous Mandos of them all.
Although this analysis is based on Mando’a orthography, it suggests a restricted number of phonemes. The pronunciation guide limits that even more. I couldn’t find any Mando written in IPA, although some poor sod has probably tried it. At some point in the future I might try and figure out how many phonemes it has, compared to real-world languages and other conlangs, like Klingon and Dothraki.
There’s no real conclusion here, except that it hasn’t escaped my notice that the seven most common letters in Mando’a, ARIEU’T, are similar to the word for traitor, foreigner, outsider: aruetii, which could be a bemusing in-universe cultural artifact, and that double letters don’t seem to mean anything, pronunciation-wise, so why is the third most common bigram AA when it doesn’t denote a long vowel or anything useful?
(and if Etain’s name came from ETAOIN?)