Common (na Xafen)
| High Common | |
|---|---|
| na Xafen | |
 Flag of the New World Order | |
| Pronunciation | [[Help:IPA|ˈʃa.ven]] |
| Created by | Peter K. Davidson |
| Setting | Earth 0077 |
| Native speakers | ~800 million, 4.5 billion L2 (2115) |
Old Common
| |
Dialect | Old Common, High Common, various Low Common |
| Official status | |
Official language in | New World Order |
| Regulated by | Na Akkatemi na Xafen Zisse (Common Language Academy) |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | qcx |
Common is a language spoken on Earth 0077. In that dimension, almost the entire planet is dominated by a polity called the New World Order. Almost all media obtained from that dimension are in the Common language, although there is ample evidence of natural languages we are familiar with from our own dimension still being spoken. The history of Earth 0077 and our own dimension appear nearly identical until the early 2020s, where they begin to diverge significantly. Because of the dominance of Common in most public life in Earth 0077, the aetherscope has been able to recover ample materials from this dimension but little in the way of exposition on the Common language. Our greatest source on the Common language itself is a blog published in the Free State of Britain, which is apparently the sole remaining polity where English remains dominant.
The writer, who writes under the pseudonym "Trafalgar," writes in English for an English-speaking audience. They appear to be a former adventurer and current academic, and the purpose of their blog is to provide information on Common and the New World Order for British people, and it seems that they write under a pseudonym in order to provide unvarnished opinions without suffering personal, negative consequences. They write as though they may have collaborators, but all posts thus far have been tagged as posted by Trafalgar, and there is no definite evidence of other collaborators.
Earth 0077 is interesting because it is time-slipped relative to our own. For that reason, it is a potential source of new technologies, as well as information and cautions about the dangers we may face in our own time. The aetherscope accesses that dimension at a time point with a constant offset from our own that appears to be approximately 100 years offset.
Trafalgar's Common Social Resource blog is mirrored in real time at the link given here, but frustratingly, they don't include the year in their dates and the dates are updated when they edit their articles and increment the revision. Trafalgar's materials are invaluable, however, because they allow us to understand potentially useful materials from Earth 0077 with much greater ease than would otherwise be possible, and their exposition about the New World Order, while necessarily limited and biased, has nevertheless been hugely helpful in understanding the context of other materials recovered from that dimension. They appear to be exceptionally knowledgeable about the New World Order and at least make an attempt at academic objectivity, as a number of their assertions that researchers initially questioned turned out to be corroborated and confirmed by other sources.
Introduction
Common is the official and main working language of the New World Order (NWO - in Common, na Lufis Sefetysyn na Onpa or LSO). The NWO is the dominant governmental authority on Earth 0077, claiming to be the sole, rightful global sovereignty. The Order appears to control the entire planet with the exception of the Five Free States ("nar suz ikrowéteras sifysyn" in Common, "the five noncompliant states"), consisting of Britain, Québec, Israel, South Korea and Japan. These five states are able to exclude the authority of the New World Order form their territory. The Order is able to effectively control the rest of Earth 4177, and from the Order's perspective, the Free States are not legitimate, independent sovereignties, but NWO states in a state of noncompliance.
Common is the first language of about 800 million people, or approximately 11% of the global population, and is estimated to have approximately 4.5 billion second language speakers. These figures come from the 2115 Global Census. However, as Trafalgar writes about their world, "Yes, technological civilization survived and yes, some areas of technology like computers and biotech are more refined, but in general, the modern world is tired and broken and cruel, and healing only slowly."[1] The Order's ability to gather data in hence somewhat flawed despite its technological advantages, and it is far from transparent. These figures need to be taken with a grain of salt. However, enough corroboration exists that we believe they are roughly correct.
These numbers understate the importance of Common. Those 800 million people represent the entire elite class and most of the professional class in the NWO. Virtually all education and public life is conducted in that language, and other languages appear to be driven to a substratum position. The time point observed by the aetherscope appears to be one where language replacement of most natural languages by Common on a massive scale is in its early phases but advancing rapidly.
The language is always referred to as "Common" when speaking about it in English, and the name of the language is similarly translated when referring to it in other languages. The native name is 'na Xafen zisse' ('the Common language') or just 'na Xafen' (Common), pronounced /na 'ʃa.ven/.
Common is a constructed language. The New World Order plans to officially celebrate its centennial in 2122. It was invented by amateur language creator Peter K. Davidson for use on an early 21st century television show (what Trafalgar insists in calling a "screenshow") called Hillbillies, and developed a devoted fan following. It later became associated with the Globalist mass movement where it was used as a code language, and then began a new life as a global lingua franca when the Globalists achieved ascendancy and founded the New World Order in 2043.
Characteristics
Common is an a priori constructed language with extensive real-world language contact influences. Its creator was commissioned to create a language that wasn't based on any existing language that would seem unfamiliar or disorienting to an audience and not evoke any particular real-world society, but that would not pose an undue challenge for English speaking actors. It was important that actors be able to pronounce the language, but not important that they understand what they were saying. Hence, Common is relatively prosaic phonologically from an English perspective but has some relatively stranger qualities in other respects.
Common has isolating tendencies. It prefers an SVO word order but uses case marking on its mandatory articles and has relatively free phrase order. It uses ergative-absolutive alignment, which is unusual for an SVO language, but Trafalgar speculates that Davidson didn't have a full grasp on what he was doing when he created this aspect of Common.[2] It does not have grammatical gender, but the original version of the language did, and traces of the original system remain in the language.
The structure of Common is very pro-drop with many elements in specific roles being able to be dropped very readily. Verbs are unique for declaring their core argument structure without agreeing with any of their arguments. Old Common had an abstract/concrete gender distinction, but this was lost in the transition to modern High Common.
Common is notable for a very specific phrase structure with both head first and head last qualities. Every phrase has a left head that carries all of the grammatical information and a right head that carries the most salient semantic information.
Common defines its own linguistic concepts and forces people to deal with them. Trafalgar is often at pains when to point out where Common is making up its own categories and terminology that they regard as nonstandard or incorrect. This is seen particularly with parts of speech. The parts of speech of Common as determiners (mandatory articles that introduce noun phrases and mandatory auxiliary verbs that introduce verb phrases), terms (a collapsed class of nouns and verbs that get their "noun-ness" or "verb-ness" from the determiner they are used with), modifiers (adjectives and adverbs), conjunctions, and interjections.
History
Trafalgar has written a more extensive history of the language, and a number of other articles that fill in significant gaps in Common's history as we know it.[3] The first Hillbillies episodes with dialog in Common aired in 2022, so the substantial work of the creating the language was probably performed in 2021-2022.
Peter K. Davidson claims to have followed a naturalistic process to create the Common language, but Trafalgar, for one, clearly doubts this was actually the case. They seem to think that Davidson gave Common some attributes designed to make it look like it was created in a naturalistic fashion (i.e., evolved from a constructed protolanguage following the principles of historical linguistics to create a language that looks like the product of normal linguistic evolution). Davidson died during civil unrest in 2031 at the age of 44 and his husband followed not long after, and it appears few of his personal notes survived. Davidson's death marks the end of the fan- and creator-driven growth of the language and the transition into Common being more the possession of young, radical Globalists who had significant overlap with the Hillbillies fan base and who used it as a kind of code speech.
The language underwent extensive evolution between its creation in ca. 2021 and its adoption as the official language of the New World Order in 2043. It underwent phonological and grammatical changes, especially the loss of gender and the re-purposing of the gender agreement morphology to mark a definite/indefinite distinction on nouns and to take over the realis/irrealis marking on verbs. It also coined and borrowed a large amount of new vocabulary.
Na Akkatemi na Xafen Zisse, the "Common Language Academy," or "AXZ," was created in 2043 to codify the Common language.[4] Under the leadership of David Chang, the formal language today known as "High Common" was codified in a way that attempted to both make it standard and universal, but within that to keep it as close to the actual speech of elite speakers as possible. This had the effect of formalizing the changes away from Old Common, the language of Hillbillies. The AXZ was tasked with hiring an army of experts in every field imaginable coining a huge amount of new vocabulary and terminology to make Common a fully competent replacement for English.
Since roughly the 2060s, changes to official High Common have slowed down, and at the same time, adoption of the language has grown exponentially. Common is the language of education and public life, and parents who are speakers of other languages will often speak only Common to their children, so their children will grow up as native speakers and obtain social and economic advantages. At the same time, the status of other languages has cratered, and English has fallen particularly far outside the protective oasis of Britain.[5]
Sociolinguistics
Common has one main official form, High Common, which is regulated by the AXZ and which has only minor global variation among educated speakers. The is the form of Common used in the media and in writing and taught in school. In addition, every locality has a dialect of Low Common. Low Common has huge geographic variation in phonology, vocabulary and grammar, and typically strong substratum language influences.
The elites are all native Common-speakers and speak High Common. Below them, the professional classes have become mostly Common-speaking - those who aren't native speakers all speak it fluently as a second language, as this is an absolute necessity to occupy the higher socioeconomic strata. They also speak High Common with more local Low Common accents and influences.
The lower classes are less likely to speak Common natively and more likely to speak it as a second language, and are more likely to speak Low Common.
Low Common and High Common are actually a dialect continuum, where High Common is completely identifiable, but shading into innumerable Low Common varieties all over the world. Absolutely all Common speakers understand both High Common and the local variety of Low Common, and even elites may slip into some local Low Common in unguarded moments. Typically everyone simply speaks to everyone else in the form of Common they are most comfortable with. People attempting to climb socially will often try to affect a more High Common form of speech, and a Low Common speaker when traveling to an area with a different variety of Low Common may have trouble being understood and may try to speak better High Common in an attempt to bridge the gap.