What would Imperial Gothic sound like?

 How would Imperial Gothic actually sound if we could listen to it?

SLOWDOWN IN RATE OF CHANGE

Of course this will only be even slightly possible if we assume a massive slowdown in the rate of language drift.

Proto Indo-European is about 6,000 years ago. Fragments of core word sound remain, so if you are listening to those descended languages they do all sound different to something like Chinese or Khoekhoe.

But Imperial Gothic is, as they say on the front of the box, 40,000 years in the future, if language change continues at the same rate then any spoken tongue would be so different that even the wildest projections based upon what we do know now would be totally inaccurate.

English has perhaps slowed down in its shifting, the last 500 years at least would at least be generally comprehensible to each other. Some of this must be due to printing, and the expansion and integration of different populations - is it fair to argue that the rate of language change in human culture slows down a LOT over the next 40,000 years?



PRIMACY OF ENGLISH

I will also imagine that English, or more likely something that has some strong influence from English, remains important in human language.

One reason this might be the case is the way English is closely locked in to a lot of the scientific and technical language of the world. People speaking very non Indo-European languages seem to have an easier time learning English than the other way round and lots of scientists speak it or a version of it to communicate in.

Still I don't imagine the actual English language remaining.

I would argue that what might remain is a combination of phonemes; word sounds and voice-shapes, syntax, since the pattern of a language is much more resistant to change than its individual parts, and some scientific and technical terms, since those seem 'sticky', like legacy programmes locked into the structure of technology which, even when replaced, might generate symbols of themselves in the systems that consume them, like the 'recycle bin' in a drive an 'IP Address' or 'Boyles Law'.



THE DEVELOPMENT OF PROTO-TECH

I imagine a growth and massive mutation of English, absorbing words and concepts from all cultures, blurring together with them, over millennia, changing in its contents, and over tens of millennia, the 'technical terms' which provide the unchanging spine of the language of engineers and computer programmers, and whatever super-scientists exist in the future, forms and kind of backwards proliferation in which the meanings and potentialities of those terms are worked back into the everyday language of ordinary people. Like an engineering term describing a glitch or feedback becomes a common term for a mistake or returning and recycling error, until that term itself comes to mean 'mistake'.

So that’s a common lingua franca I imagine prevalent at the start of the dark age of technology.



THE AGE OF STRIFE

During the dark age of technology we can imagine a massive expansion of humanity, does this mean greater diversity of language or greater integration into unified tongues?

Well, it doesn't matter because 90% of the population die during the age of strife and 99% of the technical data and non-hardcopy digital records are either destroyed or turned into murder-memetics - or in the case of warp possession, literal bad dreams that eat you.

What remains, and specifically what remains on Earth, is probably a mass, very simplified, argot, based on Tech (but with maybe 5000 years of diversion plus fragments of holdover archived knowledge).
This would make things harder to predict but we have a handy assistant - the Emperor of Mankind and his big project, the Empire of Man.



THE EMPERORS GREAT CRUSADE (AGAINST ALTERNATIVE LANGUAGES)


CENTRALISED AND UNIFORM

The Emperor wants things CENTRALISED - he wants the entirety of humanity to be able to speak together (specifically to pay him taxes and so his crusades can be organised) so wherever he conquers (everywhere) he is going to enforce a single language of state. HANDY.


DELIBERATELY ARCHAIC

The Emperor fucking loves old empires and human history. He is one of few people who remembers them. So where possible he will probably, like with his buildings and his military, try to reintroduce a 'greatest hits' of Human historical language usage. Also handy for us.


A SEMI-ENGINEERED LANGUAGE

Though he probably started from and adapted from the basic argot of age of strife Terra he (being a massive autocrat) will certainly have taken steps to engineer Imperial Gothic in ways which reinforce the structure, uniformity and stability of the culture that uses it.


HIGH AND LOW

BUT - also like an autocrat, we know there is a 'High Gothic' (sometimes represented in books by Latin) and a 'Low Gothic - a demotic version of the language.

Nothing that surprising about that. In Rome the elite all spoke Greek, during the Renaissance most of the European elite spoke Latin, I think the Chinese had a version of this too. The idea of the Nobility speaking literally or effectively, a different language which the proles don't or rarely have access to, makes sense and for all we know, may make a society more stable.

It’s here that we re-integrate the descended Sino-Tibetan languages. They, or the word forms and sounds descended from them, never really went away. Can we suppose that people brought up in an Indo-European tongue find it harder to learn a Sino-Tibetan tongue than the other way round?

If the common tongue (Low Gothic) has a root in 'Tech' then it’s likely to be good at clearly and simply describing direct material things. Maybe it’s not a 'poetic' language, with a range of possible meanings to various things decided by circumstance and context, but quite a brutal "i will do this" "this thing will happen than that thing" kind of language.

So High Gothic, I imagine as drawing much more from the Sino-Tibetan and general South Asian word and sound pool, and, as a reaction to, and deliberate differentiation from, the practical and physically descriptive nature of Low Gothic, I imagine it being bestrewn with varied meanings and suggestive interpretations.

Mastering the varied possibilities is part of proving yourself as a noble, its not meant to be easy, its meant to be hard, and even within that to have layers so different versions of the aristocracy can do status games with each other.

I imagine High Gothic to have a lot of the Tonalities from Chinese and other Sino-Tibetan tongues which Low Gothic doesn’t have. You can produce very complex variations in meaning and suggestion by adding the layer of tones and they are very hard for someone without a lot of resources and experience to learn and master – it’s a 'master' language.


So my final analysis is;

If you were listening to someone speaking Low Gothic it would sound a bit like someone with a foreign accent rapidly reading out single syllables from the back of a scientific textbook, and very occasionally, maybe once every 1,000 words, you would hear a fragment of a sound or phrase that you almost recognised, like "somethingsomethingsomethingnegativfreqsomethingsomething". But of you could take the time to learn it, if you were an English speaker, you could probably do so reasonably well. All the words and concepts would be different but sentences and word ordering would be much the same.

If you were listening to High Gothic, I think that (if you were an English speaker) it would sound like someone speaking a schizophrenic mangling of the above tongue, but in a Chinese accent, with lots of non indo-european words, lots of tonal shifts you couldn't quite trace, and probably softer, slower and more sonorous. Like a child singing sad garbled pseudo-Chinese, as opposed to the more guttural, faster and aggressive sounding rat-a-tat of Low Gothic.