Google Translate, Y'all · 5:26am May 10th, 2018
One of the biggest problems I'm having with writing Dante is his origin.
He was born in Switzerland around about ten thousand years before the Battle of Earth took place, which is what landed him in Equestria. Switzerland, from what I've found, has only been populated for about ten thousand years.
Dante was born just a little after the first tribes took to Switzerland, making him roughly ten thousand years old.
But can I say... finding what language these first Swiss spoke is a massive pain in the ass.
It was presumably German, at least a very old German. So Dante's mother tongue would be German.
The problem is, I can't have him speak ancient German because the only way I have to write German sentences is Google Translate.
The problem with Google translate is it's a robot and it can't adapt to how fluid language is. So Dante will say fuck but since I ran it through Google, it turns it into shit. Since fuck doesn't exist in the German language... or rather, it means nothing at all. As evidenced by Fucking, Austria.
So, yeah... I hate writing anything other then English.
Ranting over.
fucking - ficken
4857218
That's what I get for trying to recall shit at 3 in the morning.
I mean, wouldn't it make sense to use some sort of proto germanic instead? pretty sure there's an existing lexicon of it. If you wanted to be really hipster, you could try making him speak proto indo-european.
4857731
Yeah, that's what he would be speaking. A very early root language that we probably can't reconstruct in any meaningful way because it substantially predates written history. I'd say the best approach is to either throw in a time compression/dilation to get something you can work with (e.g. Latin), or never actually write out what comes out of his mouth because anything else you explicitly write out is going to be wrong.
4857767
So, what you're saying is just kind of ignore the fact that in reality Dante's mother tongue is dead and just have him born right around the time Latin was beginning to be used by the Swiss?
4857781
Eh, it's more that I'm saying you shouldn't torture yourself unnecessarily about this. I can definitely understand wanting to avoid Latin because it is so well known, but you can at least find another language we have properly documented to work with rather than delving deep into the most uncertain and academic part of linguistics.
4857767
both of those languages are well explored though. We have a semi complete lexicon for both of them, and are reconstructing grammar for them as well.
4857803
Ok, I just did some checking, and while we do have a decent understanding of them, they are far too modern. PIE is the older of the two, but even that isn't nearly old enough with the introduction being around 6,500 years ago. He needs half again that age, and I can't even find any reference to what that language would be, let alone details of how it works so he's almost certainly screwed on the accuracy front if he wants to go back that far.
4857831
Yeah, I chose a really bad time to have Dante born at, the friggin' beginning of the Mesolithic era.
In any case, I looked over the next chapter and I think I figured out how I'm going to do it.