Nomad Speech.

[Sciamach]

To be honest, I've found that people's issue with nomspeech is less the concept of nomspeech itself, and more the implementation.

By that I mean: It's not nomspeech that needs fixing, it's the people using it and trying too much to be Uber mysterious with it that leaves other people confused and unwilling to accept it. I understand the desire to want to be all cool with a layer of mystery slapped in but people also need to be able to understand you-- function > form basically

So.. I'm going to try to simplify this even further and come up with a brief guide as to how I do nomspeech. This won't be perfect by any means but I've done my best over the 1.5+ years or so I've been working with it to be as clear and concise as I possibly can.

So, lets start with a basic example sentence-- lets say an engagement notice:

Normal: " You have trespassed on my territory, prepare to be fired upon! "

Plain and simple. So, lets start with the asterisks-- these are meant to symbolize that, instead of the usual radio chatter passing ship-to-ship, this is instead being broadcast through telepathy to the minds of the nearby pilots

Telepathy: " *** You have trespassed on my territory, prepare to be fired upon! *** "

Next, we need to change all pronouns into their squid-esque interpretations- Nomads are still learning the human concepts of individuality and the perception of the self so these will always be slightly stilted when compared to human speech. For ease on my part, I usually separate these by dashes to break up the word flow a little bit and to emphasize the lack of conceptualization mentioned before. They apply as follows:

Pronoun changes: " *** -Yours- have trespassed on -ours- territory, -yours- to be fired upon! *** "


Now, personally, I've always removed things like "have" from nomad parlance- to further emphasize the more broken-nature of their speech (usually symbolized by a ellipses. This is further exemplified when it comes to proper or implied nouns-- things that nomads don't exactly have a matching word in their vernacular for, so the human mind- once sent the information of such an object, would then piece together the nearest word analogous to what the nomad's thinking of. This doesn't always translate 100% well, so there are some... subtle differences. I take care here to make the substituted word as close to blatantly obvious as possible-- so things like stations and systems are usually "dark-hulks" or "void scapes/sectors". That one's a little more nebulous but most of the time the message is clear.

Proper Noun modifications: " *** -Yours- ... trespassed on -ours- void... -yours- to be fired upon! *** "

Finally, nomads are emotional little buggers, and don't have any need or reason to hide their feelings when they inhabit a society wherein telepathy is the only means of communication-- this is exemplified usually towards the end of the message in either brackets or parenthesis ( I prefer the latter.) Once that's done: verbs. Like I said, they're emotional creatures- so that means if a squid sees someone they don't like infringing on their turf, they're gonna be pretty forceful in their threats and declarations through their choice of verb (sometimes further emphasized with slashes)-- and again- their vernacular is different to ours and not everything matches up 100%. You'll see what I mean below-- Also: when angry or inquisitive, I'll sometimes put a (!) or (?) before or after the stated emotion respectively.

Emotion and verbiage: " *** -Yours- ... /trespass/ on -ours- void... -yours- to be purged (!) (fury) *** "

And there ya have it-- that's a bit of a summary as to my thought process of converting a sentence into nomspeech. Like I said: I'm in no way implying this should be the only way, or that it is the best way to use squidtalk, but I've had more success than most people I've talked with on the subject when it comes to squidtalk. Either way, hope this helps at least some people. For added convenience, Below I'll put some more commonly used phrases to ease things along. Cheers.

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Engagement notice:

"*** -yours-- to /burn/ (seething anger) ***"

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Amused:

"*** -darkmind-... weak/pathetic (entertained) ***"

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Questioning:

" *** -hulk- to not.. /spitfire/ -ours- (?) ***"

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Observation:

" *** (Phil-known) near -ours- (curious) ***"

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[ sci·am·ach ]
/sīˈamək/

A simple, angry man casually working his way through life on a personal quest to acquire copious amounts of street cred.