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Spook Speak


Narcoleptic Axolotl

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Okay, so we started talking about this over at Southern Scadrian Linguistics, but this is interesting enough to deserve a thread of its own.

Wasing of the wanting to be learning of Spook's funky grammar. Ising of the inviting @EmeraldMind to be explaining of it for the benefiting of his (or her, idk) fellow sharders.

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On 6/16/2018 at 5:02 PM, Narcoleptic Axolotl said:

Okay, so we started talking about this over at Southern Scadrian Linguistics, but this is interesting enough to deserve a thread of its own.

Wasing of the wanting to be learning of Spook's funky grammar. Ising of the inviting @EmeraldMind to be explaining of it for the benefiting of his (or her, idk) fellow sharders.

First and foremost, sorry it has taken me a so long to get back to this. I have been busy in my personal life and haven't had time to hang out on forums. So, my apologies.

Ok, back to business. I'm going to copy the original post and expand upon it.

First and foremost Eastern Street Slang is meant to be confusing. It is quite literally meant to be as ridiculous as possible while still being understandable. To that end changing the rules to meet your needs is acceptable, so long as there is context to understand your idea.

For more hard rules here are a few:

  • Tense is usually set in the beginning of the sentence or statement. "Ising of", "Wasing of", "Doing of", is "I am", "I was", "I will be".
  • Subject is usually contextually set, but can be set at the beginning along with tense. For example of "Being of cold" would become "I am cold"
    • Alternatively you could phrase that as "Ising of cold of being"
    • An example of setting tense at the beginning rather than the English style of setting tense throughout you might have "Wasing of cold of being at darkness"
    • That last statement translates to "I was cold at night". I switched night to darkness to help create more chaos, but contextually you should be able to guess.

@MountainKing linking to the High Imperial section does a great job of explaining the rules. So I'll mostly just post examples of ways to phrase things.

Up above you said :

Quote

Wasing of the wanting to be learning of Spook's funky grammar

I'd phrase it more like "Wasing of wanting of liking of as speaking Spook"

So to break this down:

  • Setting the tense comes first. I did this with "Wasing"
  • Adjectives come next, but we didn't have any.
  • Verbs are next and should always end in -ing unless it ruins the meaning of the word.
  • Nouns come after verbs.
  • Sentences being short rather than long is important. The longer the sentence, the easier it is to understand. I debated on leaving the "of liking" in there as it adds a bit of clarity. But when examining the sentence as a whole I figured "of wanting of liking of" sounded more confusing to an outside person trying to understand the meaning. 
  • The context of both parties is important in Eastern Street Slang. In this case I assume that you all will know when I say "speaking Spook" you know I'm talking about speaking ESS, but to try and confuse outsiders I'm phrasing more specifically.

 

So, as this post goes if anyone wants to put sentences or phrases in I can translate them to Eastern Street Slang/ High Imperial, and give explanations about why I did what I did, or if anyone wants to write in ESS I'll look it over and give suggestions. Remember though, there isn't any real way to speak ESS wrong so much as speaking it better. You can change rules to suit your needs. The whole language is a challenge to be as confusing as possible while being able to communicate with those who also use it.

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Having the needing of using the awkward. Saying and speaking as suiting desires. 

My only real issue with this weird piglatin style language is that it always has been more complicated than we're shown rules for. Mainly I get that from. The way Spook's street slang name is explained in HoA. 

Quote

"You have a name, boy?"

    Spook opened his mouth, then stopped. His old name didn't seem like it would do any more. "Lestibournes," he finally said.

    The old man didn't bat an eye. Later, Kelsier would decide that Lestibournes was too difficult to say, and name him "Spook" instead. Spook never did figure out whether or not Clubs knew how to speak Eastern street slang. Even if he did, Spook doubted that he'd understand the reference.

    Lestibournes. Lefting I'm born.

    Street slang for "I've been abandoned."

We can have fun and make a usable confusing nonsense language. I don't think it will ever actually be what Spook spoke though. 

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