Talk:Old Solar

Should we make a page for the book series itself here, or should we just link to the page on Wikipedia? (also, being that Old Solar seems pretty earthlang-ey despite being spoken (I guess) in outer space, does it qualify as an exolang, or just an artlang?) -bornfor 25 October 2011 00:37 EDT

Hmm, given that our focus is conlangs and concultures, the series itself might link to Wikipedia, though we might still have pages for the world(s) it covers under apter titles. As for exolanginess - no, it doesn't seem to try to be alien; indeed, I seem to remember the books mentioning, at some point or other, that it was supposed to be the original language of Earth before the Fall (or possibly before Babel?). However, when Ransom first meets a Martian there is a clear reference to some sort of alien phonology:

"The Malacandrian word for food or eat which he got in return proved to contain consonants unreproducible by a human mouth [...]"

--though there is no reference anywhere else to him having any difficulty in pronouncing the language, or any difficulty for the human inhabitants of Perelandra in doing so. (My personal idea is that, since at this point there was not exactly understanding between Ransom and the hross, it might have been some sort of expletive or onomatopoeic utterance, not the word he was expecting; another person who put together a page on Old Solar believes that such a phoneme is regular in the language and equates it with some part or other of the word pfifltrigg, which I'm still fairly sure is not a word native to the language at all.) --Muke Tever | ✎ 22:41, 24 October 2011 (PDT)