For your consideration. . .

[gridlore]

In the default Traveller setting of the Third Imperium, written Galangic is a Logosyllabic script, with each symbol representing morphemes, often polysyllabic morphemes, but when extended phonetically represent single syllables.

This would allow written Galangic to be a truly universal language, as any literate sophont would be able to read it no matter what their spoken tongue, which for some aliens would be none at all.

This gives me the wonderful idea of "chat tables" at all your better Startown bars and hotels. It's a table with multiple handcomp ports. You plug in, choose your spoken language from the table's menus, and once everyone is in, you start speaking. The table transcribes your speech to Galangic and displays it as a hologram in front of you. Or on your comp's screen is discretion is necessary. These kinds of speech to universal text programs might be very common.

Just another bit of worldbuilding.

Comments

[digitalsidhe]

I think the problem goes beyond that. Grammar is a big issue, but how do you even handle the issue of different languages having different vocabulary? To say nothing of different phonotactics?

If I'm understanding this right, Galangic script is a commonly known script such that every literate sophont can look at a string in it and go, "Ah, that would be pronounced like such-and-so", and they can also take any sequence of sounds in their language and produce a corresponding transcription in Galangic script. Have I got that right?

If so, then that just means it occupies the same place in Galactic communication as the Roman alphabet does in most of Europe. Leaving aside places like Greece or Belarus that use other alphabets, there are lots of language communities that speak, e.g., English, French, Spanish, German, Polish, Finnish, Icelandic, and Lithuanian, all using the same basic writing system. A speaker of one can look at a sentence from another language and often have a good idea of how it's pronounced... but that doesn't give them any more insight into the meaning than just hearing the thing said aloud did.

So... I guess I'm missing something?

(I'm leaving aside the fact that if this script is a syllabary, that means spoken Galangic must have fairly tight phonotactical rules, because otherwise the number of potential syllables would proliferate way beyond what anyone could learn, and that means that the script wouldn't be well suited to transcribing sounds in looser languages — sort of like how hiragana and katakana don't do a very good job of transcribing English. That's a whole nother issue.)