Common (na Xafen): Difference between revisions

|setting      = Earth 0077

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 an abundance of materials in Common from this dimension but little in the way of exposition on the Common language itself in English. 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 on earth where English remains dominant.

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 in the future.

Trafalgar's [https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/language/common/ Common Social Resource blog] is mirrored in real time at the link given here, but frustratingly, they don't include the year in their article publication dates, and the publication date is updated every time they edit and release a new version of an article, which is frequently. 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.

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 all nuclear powers, and are able to exclude the authority of the New World Order from their territory. The Order is able to effectively control the rest of Earth 0077, 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."[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/6/] The Order's ability to gather data is hence somewhat flawed despite its technological advantages, and the Order itself 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.

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.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/114/] 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.

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.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/6/] 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.

''Na Akkatemi na Xafen Zisse'', the "Common Language Academy," or "AXZ," was created in 2043 to codify the Common language.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/102/] 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 in particular outside the protective oasis of Britain has fallen dramatically in status.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/108/]

Essentially this means that inside a word, a single consonant in this class will always be voiced if it is between two sounds which are always voiced. These voiced sounds would be things like vowels, or consonants without unvoiced variants, like /l/, /w/, /r/, /n/, and /m/. If a consonant cluster or geminate (double) consonant occurs, matters become more complicated. If the cluster starts with a continuant (any sound which does not completely obstruct the airflow, such as [s] but not [t]), the voicing does not take effect; otherwise it does, except in the case of gemination. geminate consonants in this class are always devoiced.

Null: ∅

Single consonant: c, f, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, r, s, t, w, x, z

Thus, Common uses a 21 letter alphabet. The Common writing system tends to be a very good phonemic representation of Common pronunciation, but does not capture any of the rules of allophony. The other five letters, however, are part of the official Common alphabet and are actually used, although increasingly rarely. They exist for historical reasons, because the first keyboards used by writers of Common had these letters, and because Common writers routinely employed some loanwords without adjusting their spelling to the rules of Common.

The alphabetical order, including the non-standard letters is the same as English. This came about because of the early influence of English on the development of the language - the language's creator was an Anglophone, the ''Hillbillies'' TV itself was an American show, the show's first audience was Anglophone, and the first published materials for the language were written in English. Table 5 summarizes the alphabet and how the letters are used. Non-standard letters and the basic repair strategy used if they are encountered are included, in italics.

Like British English, Common is primarily written using keyboards, either physical or touchscreen, and secondarily using pen and paper. Historically, during much of its development, Common was written almost exclusively on keyboards, heavily favoring touch devices.

In terms of its default word order, Common is an SVO language in main clauses. It is also an ergative language. SVO word order is unusual for an SVO language. As Trafalgar points out, though, Common is only morphologically ergative, through its article cases.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/113/] Syntactically, Common is actually accusative, as they point out with the following example:

**Irrealis - IRREAL (na sihys puesyn): The action is somehow hypothetical or potentially counterfactual. The reason why the moods are called "realis" and "irrealis" rather than "indicative" and "subjunctive," which arguably is what they actually are since they are mediated by inflection, is because the irrealis used to be indicated by an affix in Old Common. During the breakdown of the gender system, the abstract gender agreement form of the auxiliary was repurposed to indicate the irrealis, but the terminology used to refer to it was not updated.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/47/]

An important category of verbs that are semitransitive, aside from verbs of motion, are verbs of abstract possession or ownership, where the owner is the absolutive subject and the thing owned is the dative indirect object. Such constructions express relatively alienable possession.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/8/]

The word 'sy' is a term of respect and is actually referring back to the woman in this case, not the dog (if it were referring to the dog it would be last). This is an adposition possessive, referring to the referent in a respectful way.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/8/]

In the following sections, each of the noun determiners/articles/pronouns will be detailed with their declensions and usage. The lemma, or dictionary entry, for each article is its absolutive singular form. Note: it is not an omission that possessive forms of the pronouns are not given. Common genuinely lacks explicitly possessive forms, although one way to indicate possession is using the null preposition, which takes an object in the nominative case, allowing the nominative to sometimes act like a genitive case.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/8/]

The second person pronoun/article is "zu". Like "we", it is a normal determiner that can take a head term. Unlike 'we', it is actually quite common to use a head term with "zu." Honorific or polite forms of address are virtually mandatory except with intimates, functioning like a T-V distinction in a language like French or Spanish. These are implemented in Common with honorific head terms rather than grammaticalized. Formality and respectful address in Common is an extensive topic that Trafalgar addresses [https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/23/ here].

There is one interrogative pronoun in Common, "ko." Ko does not have a definiteness distinction but does have all three numbers. It is used in asking questions, but despite the fact that Common grammarians refer to it as an interrogative, its presence does not always indicate a question. It can also be used just like "what" in English in non-questions, like "I don't care what kind" to "which one," a declarative sentence, where ko's function is to signal that its referent is open to question in some way. Common doesn't actually have a clear and unambiguous way to ask questions (or to give orders) and depends on context and idiom. [https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/40/] In general, 'ko' can be used as a replacement for 'a' in questions and it signals the questionable element.

Noun modifiers in Common equate to adjectives, prepositions that refer to noun phrases, and nominal relativisers.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/7/]

Verb modifiers in Common equate to adjectives, prepositions that refer to verb phrases or entire sentences, and verbal relativisers.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/9/]

Note that for making negative statements, Common is a negative concord language. See Trafalgar for details.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/42/]

Common has a concept of "tight" or "loose binding" in modifiers.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/10/] All modifiers inherently have this binding property. Loose binding modifiers are as we have discussed - they apply to the overall noun or verb phrase. Tight binding modifiers are a smaller class of modifiers that bind "tightly" to whatever follows them - in essence, they are modifiers of modifiers.

Common exclusively has prepositions as opposed to postpositions.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/17/] Prepositions are seen as a kind of modifier. Modifiers fall into grades - the first grade is a closed class of weak modifiers that all require objects. They are all prepositions. The second grade that generally also take an object but that can sometimes function without one, and so are sometimes prepositions. The third grade is an open class and can never take an object, so never function as prepositions.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/82/]

Conjunctions in Common are a closed class and typically are used for rhetorical flow. They come in two varieties, "edge" and "internal."[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/12/] Edge conjunctions are used to join phrases or sentences, whereas internal conjunctions are used to join elements inside a phrase. Edge and internal conjunctions often come in pairs with similar meaning and sometimes are identical. An example where there is a difference is "pi" (internal) and "epis" (edge) which both mean "and."

Common has a wide range of suffixes and prefixes that can be used derive new words with different meanings.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/13/] The most significant and useful are:

As well, it is possible in Common to create compound words.[https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/94/] Compounds are usually of terms, with the head being the rightmost term.

Trafalgar's blog includes a [https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/lexeme/common/list/ searchable lexicon]. While we have found words in other sources that are not in the lexicon and have inferred something about their meaning, Trafalgar's lexicon is reasonably detailed and written in English and is the best source we have on Common vocabulary. Their dictionary appears to be a work in progress and adds new words on a regular basis.

Trafalgar provides a series of example texts along with some contextual background on [https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/list/literature/ the literature section of their blog]. Here we will give one, specific example with a full IPA pronunciation and gloss, which Trafalgar doesn't always provide.

This text is a paragraph from the [https://webconlang.infiniterecursion.ca/article/common/110/ Globalist Manifesto], a founding document of the New World Order. The link goes to a larger except, which has the IPA and a sound file but not a full gloss.