Common (na Xafen): Difference between revisions

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 histories of Earth 0077 and our own dimension appear nearly identical until the early 2020s, where we presume they begin to diverge significantly. One major early difference is that the COVID-19 pandemic did not occur in that dimension, instead records refer to a similar but later COVID-23 global pandemic. 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.

Trafalgar's [https://www.designerlanguages.com/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 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 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.

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.

''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 to coin 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/]

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 some contextual information but not a full gloss.