Author's Guide to Characters Who Talk Like Morons · 7:45am Feb 14th, 2016

After finding a few stray requests in Age of Iron stories, I've decided to compile a guide to those characters that don't talk good. Mainly the subject of those requests was Solon, but there were other characters with strange speech patterns that follow certain rules that I had assumed nobody cared about.
This will not include an Applejack section, because I'm afraid Aatxe360 will get mad at me. Plus, there's like a million examples on this site already. But mostly that first thing.

We'll start with Solon: his speech impediment is a relatively simple one that replaces every "s" and "ss" in his speech with an "sh". Any "ss" parts of a word that already make the "shuh" sound may be left alone or changed as well, at the author's discretion. Any natural "sh" is left alone. At first I also altered soft "c" sounds, but that proved way too confusing and time-consuming, so now I leave them alone.
"Shupply levelsh are a critical mission parameter. Deploy dropshipsh at once."
"Nurgle'sh beard, doeshn't anything shut you up?"
"Shtop ushing the shecondary thrushtersh to make popcorn. You're getting kernelsh in the fuel linesh."

Sliver has a similar rule. Whenever there is an "s" or "ss", but not an "sh", I simply add another s to it to drag out the sounds. Again, soft "c" is ignored. The only exception I make (sometimes) is the word "as", since adding another "s" turns it into "ass", and I'd like to think we're all above that sort of humor. *Cough*
"I can't sstand the Ssorcererss. Trickery and deceit, that'ss all they know."
"Ssuit up and follow me to the ship, pawnss. It iss time to pay your tithe to Chaoss."
"Put down that ssoap before I tear out your sspine, puny horsse-thing."

For some Techpriests, I have them use "formal" speech. This is a form I learned from Graham McNeil, and it mostly involves stating the purpose of the subsequent sentence before saying it. I've listed several types below. The list is hardly exhaustive, though.
Interrogative: a non-rhetorical question.
Executive: a command.
Addendum: an "also" statement.
Expansion: an extrapolation or corollary of the previous statement.
Explanatory: a statement of fact.
Counter-factual: a refutation.
Hypothetical: a guess.
Conclusive: the logical result of the accumulated evidence.
Derogatory: a statement with the intention to offend.
Introductory: an introduction.
There isn't much in the way of techy language-codes for small talk, because Techpriests are infamously bad at it. As you might have guessed.

For Luna, I use deliberately horrible olde English. Mostly because I don't know olde English. This mostly involves exchanging the "are" for "art", the "you" for "thee" and "thou", and the "your" for "thy" and "thine". However, I invite those authors that seek to write our fair moon Princess into their work to come up with their own unique way of mangling her speech in accordance with your own personal misinformation!

Speaking of mangling speech, that brings us to the Orks.
There's no right way to do Ork speech, but there's a wrong way to do Ork speech, and that's proper English. The idea is to force the reader to come up with the correct word phonetically rather than through recognized spelling. So "make" becomes "mayk" and "phone" would be "fohn". Things quickly get more difficult, however. Orks pronounce the "th" sound as an "f" or a "t". And much like our resident applehorse, they don't work well with the "ing" at the end of many words. Orks also like to string out long, complicated words with hyphens, and replace "c" with "k" and "s" with "z" sometimes. But not all the time. It's tough, but don't worry too much about it; nobody expects consistency from Orks.
"Git 'em, ladz! Krush da liddel hosses, and den smash da shinee fings!"
"I'z noh dere'z sum kinda treshuh 'round 'ere. Wotta ya fink it duz, Boss?"
"Aym fer da pink wun! It'z got da tranz-zizstah fingy!"

I hope this helps!

Report SFaccountant · 704 views · #Iron Age #Chaos #Warhammer 40K #Iron Hearts #38th Company

Comments ( 5 )