Nomad Speech.

[Wesker]

I miss being able to silent engage zoners

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[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.

[Jeremy Hunter]

As an ex-member of the K'Hara and one of the few morphs who followed Aurora (before you disappeared Alley >.>) I used a more coherent type.

Even a more coherent version was hard, but that's the charm. It's a mental link that's supposed to be hard to understand, as they are usually unable to make a clear link due to our stubborn minds. I did what Scourge up there did, and as an Order player I always liked how Nomads speak. It set apart the fact that we're human, they are not.

That's my few cents into this, as I've seen it from both sides.

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May you ever walk in the Light, Shizune.

[Exploration]

Speaking as a person who's never played a Nomad and spends his time trying to understand what they say in interactions:

I don't really have a problem with the way things are however, call me dumb or whatever- I sometimes have great difficulty understanding what they say some of the time. Possibly because the various styles between players vary and this can make one set of rules for understanding nomspeak for one person different for the next. Though this isn't such a big deal since i just get someone to translate and then respond appropriately (Or at least a vague translation, usually Shizune or someone when they're around. Sorry!)

I feel it could be written in a way that makes it slightly easier to comprehend or some sort of guideline everyone should follow to 'some' degree. But then that wouldn't make the RP for each nomad unique and that's also something that makes the whole thing worth doing so eh. Difficult one indeed. But that's just what i think.

[SnakThree]

It's a pain to read which is why I dislike encountering Nomads. I'd prefer telepathy/visions in a form of coherent sentences.

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[Cosmosaur]

Couldnt really find a vote option that refelcts my opinion accurately (would be a mix of several vote options), so here's an attempt to summarize it briefly.

Most nomad RP I saw is stupid, and I think its stupid primarily due to ***nomspeak*** restrictions.

Me-no-grammar speech is not scary, nor impressive, nor original, nor immersive. It's a pain in the a... neck. It carries the connotation of ineptitude.

If you want to make it scary, give it ADDITIONAL ways of communication, dont give it RESTRICTED ways of RPing.

Make it able to talk in any way that it wants, using any voice that it wants, using any image that it wants.

That would allow for extreme forms of originality.

Let nomads be explicitily able to launch telepathic visions and transfer emotions, but dont RESTRICT them to be able to do only that.

Also, I think factions that are explicitly at war with each other (that doesnt include pirats, mercenaries, terrorists, quasilawfuls) should be able to attack without a word, if they wish to. Maybe not in all systems, but in some at least. That would include nomads. Maybe give people conditional rights to attack without speaking first. Like... if you have an infocard (the showinfo thing) that jstuifies your attack, you should be allowed to attack without useless bla first.

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User was banned for: go away karlotta
Time left: (Permanent)

[Haste]

The majority of noms that I ran into last time I actively played massively overused symbols and all that jazz. When 80% of your sentence is crap like asterisks and dashes and whatever you're doing it wrong.

Even plain text works in my opinion, provided it's somewhat cryptic/poetic/alien.

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[SnakeLancerHaven]

Even plain text works in my opinion, provided it's somewhat cryptic/poetic/alien.

Yeah I've wondered how to write such an RP, especially now I'm trying to find one for AI RP as you said, cryptic/poetic/alien. I wonder how a sentence would look like?

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R.I.P Tabris...
Youtube - Twitch - My old Account

[Sombs]

You know what's horrible? Huggie said shit all over it and like 50% of the nomads we encountered as Vagrants did exactly that and just adapted the Vagrant speech patterns. Right now, there is a very concerning confusion within the indie/K'hara nomad playerbase. It's especially annoying as the idea behind the speech pattern of the Vagrants was to show and indicate the different communication pattern, to show "Oh, those guys are different" as our way of playing is currently the only way to differ from the sirian nomads.

It's a sad result of this thread. Would be cool if there would be something to guide for the sirian nomads again.

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