Showing results for tags 'language'.

Hello. I'm trying to figure out what language and writing system is used by the ponies in Equestria, because I plan to use some of these informations in a fanfic I'm preparing to make. From this snapshot from S01E01 "Mare in the Moon" we can get some informations about the language and writing: I recreated it below as a vector graphics without any perspective to improve the clarity: Below the book there is a transcript of what is supposedly written there in English. I mean, we hear Twilight speaking English in the series, but I consider it just an English dubbing replacing the original Equine language This text couldn't be written in English, because there's lot more letters in it than is visible in the above book page. So the original language must be different, and written more compactly than just plain English when written in Latin alphabet. Besides, why should ponies speak English in the first place instead of some other language of their own? And this is exactly what I'm trying to figure out: what language they use, how does it work, and how is it written. We can see some interesting observations here: Words are separated by spaces. Text is aligned in horizontal lines. The writing system seems to be syllabic (that is, an abjad, like Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese or Ancient Egyptian), because words are quite short: 3 glyphs on average, usually 1...4 glyphs, longer words are rare. In syllabic writing systems words tend to be short, because only consonants are written down, and vowels are default, or known from context, or marked up with additional diacritics. In writing system where vowels are written explicitly, words are usually longer. The alphabet consists probably of only 10 glyphs (see the table below). There may be more, but only these 10 are visible in this particular book page. If you know about any more, please tell me in which episode you've seen them, with time stamp. The writing system seems to be hieroglyphic, similar to Ancient Egyptian or Paleo Hebrew. I suspect these glyphs could have started as ideograms (that is, each one represented only one idea, as a whole). But later on ancient ponies figured out that they can join those ideograms together to make composite words, joining the meanings of the particular ideograms together. And for these words to be possible to pronounce, they read the first syllables of the subsequent glyphs of a word. (I'll explain it further in a minute...) One of the glyphs seems to be some kind of a prefix (or suffix): the Pony Tail glyph. It is often attached to the rump of a Horse glyph, but both these glyphs can also be used alone. In one place it's also attached to a Star glyph, making a "comet". If it's really some kind of a prefix/suffix, it should correspond to a sound which is easily joined to any other sound, like "H", for example. But, maybe it's just a coincidence... I don't know which direction it should be read: left-to-right, or right-to-left, or interleaved. But if it resembles Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs in any way, then maybe the direction can be figured out from the glyphs themselves: In Ancient Egyptian one reads a line of glyphs in a way to "meet" subsequent glyphs "from their fronts". For example, if some figure looks to the right, you need to approach it from right to left to "meet it face-to-face". So one could read Egyptian hieroglyphs in both directions, according to the direction of "looking" of these glyphs. In pony alphabet, horse figures are looking to the right, so it is probably read right-to-left, as in Hebrew. But maybe other directions are also possible (when the figures are mirror-imaged and look to the left). There's some evidence for it. For example, when Spike writes his notes in Episode 1, the bump in the papyrus under his feather seem to move right-to-left and left-to-right interchangeably. So it's possible that the direction is switched on line-by-line basis. Also, when Twilight looks through her books in Episode 1, you can clearly see that she always flips pages from right to left (that is, starting from the last page and going "back" to the first page of the book). This may suggest that books are written from the last page to the first, from right to left line/page. I don't know what sounds should be pronounced for those glyphs, but I tried to figure out the sound from the ideograms themselves. For example, I thought the best sound for the Horseshoe glyph would be the clopping "K" sound made by horse hooves clopping on the ground. For the glyph depicting Snake (at least I see a snake there, but it might also be a rope) could correspond to the hissing sound, like "S" or "Sh". The Thunder Bolt glyph could be related to some violent, "bursting" sounds, like "B", "D", or maybe electrical buzzing sound, like "Z". But I really have no clue what sounds these should be. Any ideas? In the following table, I show the whole alphabet: Beside the original hieroglyphs, I also added my own ideas of their corresponding hieratic versions, that is, for quick hand writing purposes. They're simpler and easier to scribble by pen. For each glyph, I also tried to match some sounds (in the Transliteration column). If you have any ideas how these glyphs should be pronounced and you can justify it in some way, feel free to tell me in this post. I hope for some interesting discussion here. Maybe together we can crack this code I also wrote in the table what (in my opinion) any of these glyphs depict (I have some troubles with the 0'th one, so if anypony has some idea, please tell me). Below, I wrote some possible meanings encoded in that particular glyph. Composite words can be formed by joining these glyphs and their meanings together. I've tried some examples below: Some of them are actually there in the fragment of the book shown in the screenshot, so this may be the right track. Now how to read those words? Suppose that the Horn and Crescent glyphs represent sounds for "N" and "M" respectively (I don't know this for sure, this is just a guess, for the sake of the example). So their combination might sound like MaNa, which is really the name for magical energy in many other fantasy worlds! I wonder if the similar trick could be done with the glyphs representing Bright Magic to get the word PraNa, which is also a name for bright life-giving energy in Eastern cultures. Then we'd have "mana" and "prana" for Dark Magic and Bright Magic But this could be possible only if the Star glyph were pronounced as "Pr" sound (which is not so strange for a language of horses you know, this snorting sound horses make sometimes). What other sounds do you think of for the Star glyph to make some interesting word for Bright Magic? Maybe you have some better ideas of how those glyphs should be mapped to sounds? In the table, there are also numerical values assigned to the glyphs. For now, they're just for ordering and reference purposes (let's call them PEGASCII codes though probably UniCode would be a better name for Unicorn's code ), because I don't know anything about what number systems are used by ponies (but I have some guesses; I'll get back to this). But I tried to correlate them on some logical basis. For example, glyph number 4 is the Horse glyph, because the horse has 4 legs. I used the Horn glyph to represent 1, because it's simple, just one straight slash. It's good for tally marks & stuff like that. I used the Star glyph for number 5, because it is a 5-pointed star. The number 3 is Thunder, because it has 3 lines (but this is not necessary). I took the Crescent glyph for number 6, because I wanted it to be just after the Star glyph, but it will probably be better for number 2 (two horns of the crescent). Other glyphs are assigned quite arbitrarily. But there is some interesting pattern, that all glyphs related to Unicorns are distributed in powers of two. More on this later. Also, I wondered if it wouldn't be better to use the Tail glyph as last, and Head glyph as first, but this breaks the pattern a little bit, and the Head is less useful for number 1, because its shape is too much complicated. As to the number system used by ponies, I suspect some place value system or additive system at least, because just plain unary is too limited. And it would be obvious to notice by lots of repeating glyphs for number one. I haven't seen anything like that in any of pony books. If it's place-value system (that is, a small number of digits, reused in different positions representing greater and greater powers of the base), then it could be in base 4 instead of base 10, because ponies don't have fingers to count (with the only exception of Pinkie Pie, as usual ), but they only count their whole legs (4 of them). This is related to that "powers of two" pattern above: 1, 2, 4, 8 (one leg/horn, two legs each front or back or side, foul legs in a pony, eight legs in two ponies etc.). Also, if they were to use base 10 place value system, it could be easily spotted from the first screenshot: we should have some glyph repeated thrice in a row, representing those three zeros in "1000th year". But there isn't any. So either ponies don't use base 10, but some other base (in base 4, 1000 is 33220, but we also don't see any two subsequent pairs of glyphs there), or they use just additive system, which adds values of some glyphs together. But then, we either need many glyphs to depict a number, or we need some bigger values for the glyphs (for example, 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 200, 500, 1000) to write down the number 1000 used in the Transcript. And we need some way to find out which glyphs represent numbers instead of words. But such a system, on the other hand, is more for encoding meanings, like Gematria in the Jewish Kaballah system: you can then count up a value of any word to express some interesting patterns, like similar words having similar numerical values, etc. This is still an open subject, so any ideas are welcome. If you know about any other evidence of pony alphabets, please tell me about where you've found it (what episode, what timestamp). The more cryptograms the better. But for now, my only Rosetta Stone is this single book page from the first screenshot. I hope that this will start an interesting discussion about linguistics of the Ponydom

My mother tongue is English but I've always had a knack for watching shows and movies in other languages besides English. It's fun and I like seeing other's interpretations on the characters. MLP is all around the world, with many different dubs. What's your countries dub like? Is it good? Is it bad? Are the voices somewhat good? My personal favorite is the Latin American dub. I am part Mexican and I have a few younger cousins who don't speak English and watch the shows Spanish dub, so I watch that one sometimes. I think it's quite good! The voices may not be the most accurate but they do their jobs well enough! My favorite VA is Carla Castaneda who voices Twilight. She's a very good impersonation and sings very well for Twilight! But for some reason, for episodes 14-21 they replaced her VA and it was pretty noticable. Not sure who voiced her but while she did a good job she didn't quite match Carla's voice for Twilight. Since I'm a huge weeaboo XD I love the Japanese dub as well! My favorite VA from there is Pinkie's VA (or seiyuu) Suzuko Mimori who also voices Sonoda on Love Live. She impersonates Andrea Libman's voice flawlessly and she promotes MLP quite often on her Twitter. She also voiced Maud in Rainbow Rocks. Sadly, the show never got passed Season 2 in Japan but the Equestria Girls movies exist over there and the merchandise is quite popular too. I've heard rumors of it coming back through Netflix but I'm not sure if they're true. So, what's your favorite dub? If you don't speak English and MLP airs in your country what's it like?

Saluton "ponefratoj"! Does somebody here speak Esperanto? Currently I learn it. That's an artificial language created in the 1880s by Dr. Ludwik Zamenhof to serve as world language. He lived in a city with Poles, Russians, Germans and Jews and thought that many conflicts arose due to the language barrier, so he got the idea for an international auxiallary language. It's created to be as simply as possible to learn, while still having the precision and subleties of complex natural languages. It's special point are the same endings for all words of a grammatical category, for example, nouns all end in -o and adjectives in -a. With those endings and certain a-, in- and suffixes one can create neccessary words from word stems, so the number of words you actually have to learn is quite low. "Poneo" means "pony" and "frato" is "brother". They can easily be melted into a compound noun, like in Greek and German. The -j is the plural marker, like -s is in English and French, while "fratino" (the suffix -in is for the female gender, as it's used in German) means sister (literally "female brother"). The word Esperanto itself means "the one who hopes", esper- is the word stem for hope (it's taken from several Romanic languages), while the suffix -ant (from French) is for "people that do something", and then comes the -o to make it a noun. "La espero" (la is the definite article, just like "the" in English) means just "the hope" while "espera" is "hopeful". You can create whatever words you want, like "spacbatalanto", my ponysona's name Space Warrior (spaco = space, batalo = fight, -ant = the one who does something, -o = ending for nouns) or "planedestrino" for "female ruler of a planet" (planedo = planet, -estr = boss of something, -in = female gender, -o = 'cause it's a noun). "Doktoro Esperanto" was the pseudonym under which Dr Zamenhof published the first Esperanto book (Unua Libro aka The First Book). He called the language just "La Internacia Lingvo" (The International Language), but since that's a bit long and generic, the name of the book's author became a synonym for the language. He choose that name because he hoped that his creation would one day become the global lingua franca. "Global" means that all people on the planet learn Esperanto, to use it in international situations, like as a foreign ex-change student, on a vacation or when reading a translated novel. Dr Zamenhof never thought of Esperanto to replace other languages. It's a point of critic that modern-day English is used in non-English speaking countries in situations where it isn't neccessary and many fear that a world language would totally destroy diversity. But Esperanto wouldn't. Esperanto gained a lot of attention shortly after it was published. Millions of people in all of Europe started to learn it. There were congresses and clubs all over the continent. It could have become a world language. Unfortunately, this changed because World War Two. The Nazis hated Esperanto because Dr Zamenhof was a Jew. Adolf Hitler called it a Jewish secret-language for world domination in Mein Kampf. The Nazis banned Esperanto, closed all clubs and murdered many Esperantists. Dr Zamenhof's family was targeted for extermination. After the Second World War the rise of the United States as global superpower lead to English as de facto functional world language. But English is not international - just like Latin isn't Vaticanian - , it's imperial, since it's only so popular because the British Empire once ruled the seas and the United States are so dominant in politics, economy and culture of the Western world since World War II. But who knows what's going to happen in the future. Another constructed world language (that never became one) was Volapük, created by the German Catholic priest Johann Martin Schleyer after the had a dream where God told him to create a world language. It's name means "world speak", vol means world and pük is speak, both where taken from those English words, in fact nearly all words where derived from German, French and English. Volapük was a bit popular after it's publication, too, but Esperanto replaced it. Menade bal, püki bal - Eine Menschheit, eine Sprache - One humanity, one language Interlingua was an international auxiallary language that was used for diplomacy during the Interwar period. It has an extremely simplified grammar and takes all words from Latin and Romance languages. The most recent project for a real world language is Lingwa de Planeta. People at a Russian university work on it since 2010, it's based on the most wide-spread languages in the world. There are also lots of artistic languages that belletristic writers create for fictional worlds. The Elvish tongues Quenya and Sindarin from J.R.R. Tolkien's Legendarium (The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, The Silmarillion) and Klingon from the Star Trek TV series are the best-known examples. Those three can be used, but most others have only fractual grammar and a restricted vocabulary, so they can't be spoken. But that doesn't bother somebody, since it'd be useless except at SciFi/Fantasy cons.^^

English is my first language, but i'm currently learning Japanese (If you count not learning or practicing for a couple months still 'learning' anyway) But I've got some free time now, and during summer I'll have a lot then too, so hopefully i'll pick it back up then. What about you guys? Which ones and how many can you speak?

I know three translations of the term "brony", an older fan of MLPFIM (usually male): * Chinese (my native language) - 小馬迷 (xiǎo mǎ mí) * Japanese (guess) - ブロニー (buronii) * Russian - брони (broni - also means "armour") Do you know any other translations of the word "brony"?

So, I wanted to know what your first languages were, guys. I know a lot of you are native English speakers, but a lot of people here aren't. I just wanted to know the proportions. I added pretty much every language I could think of to give proper results, but I'm sure I forgot some here and there. Anyway, give us your first language and see how many there are in the forum with the same as you. Note: I know there are several chinese languages, but for the sake of them not taking half the poll, I just regrouped them together Oh, and my first language is French, by the way.

So as an American, I realize that there are many who only speak one language (Some Americans can't even speak one language, at certain times). So I was wondering, how many people here are at least bilingual? For me I am a bilingual who speaks English and Chinese due to the fact that my adopted parents are Chinese. What do you speak and what other languages do you speak?

I think this topic is an interesting topic to post, Its fascinating how our bodys subconscious, inadvertent reaction to verbal stimuli, can portray our feelings or emotions. What if any are your thought on this subject, do you catch, or notice the body language others give off, and what has it told you of others in, and throughout your life.

I was recently thinking about the preferred languages of each creature in the show based on their mythology. Here's what I came up with: Ponies (all three, unicorn, earth and pegasi): American, Canadian and British English and Australian English as well (especially for a few of the pegasi characters in the show, namely Scootaloo's father and one of the members of the Washouts). Griffons: Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, Greek, Cyrillic script, Farsi Dragons: Multiple languages, especially that of East Asia (Mandarin and Cantonese, Korean/Hangul, Japanese Kirin: All scripts of the Chinese language, Korean/Hangul and all scripts of the Japanese language Hippogriff: Italian, French, German, and British English The Changelings: mainly American English I think that Equestria's main language would be English/Ponish, with secondary languages being French, Spanish, German, Portugese, Cyrillic scrpit, Arabic, Chinese, Korean and Japanese What do you guys think?

Welcome back! It was a long time I was absent on this forum due to some problems with my Internet connection. But during that time I was not idle: I worked (among other things) on the Unicorn Language and Alphabet I once described in this thread. (I'm going to post some new stuff there too, so stay tuned.) And now the time has come when I decided to start sharing my ideas with you. In this thread I will present my ideas and inventions about the Unicorn Language and discuss them with you, because for some ideas I have several options to choose, and I'd like to know which of them do you think would be the best. (I'm also working on a tutorial, but I'll wait with publishing it yet some time until it solidify enough.) Alphabet and phonetics OK, so first of all, there's the alphabet, which I described quite in detail in my previous thread already, but there are some new details I'd like to show you here. The table below summarizes all one needs to know about the alphabet (click to enlarge): The first column is the original book form of each glyph, as seen in Twilight's old copy of "Predictions and Prophecies" in the very first episode of the series (S01:E01). This form is used mostly in books, where readability and precision is required. Unicorns are best-suited for writing pretty glyphs since they can levitate pencils or quills with their Magic to manipulate them more precisely. But there are times when chiseling down those complex symbols every time a pony wants to write something wouldn't be much comfortable. Therefore, for faster communication, simplified cursive forms of these symbols (also called hieratic) has been invented. They are better-suited for hoof-writing, and they can be easily scribbled with a pencil held in mouth, or even by scratching them on the ground with a hoof. This is the form you can encounter in scrolls and hoof-written inscriptions. Such form is shown in the second column of the table. This column also shows how these lines evolved with time to become simpler and simpler. You might have noticed a peculiar property of these scribbles: some of them are very similar to the letters of our Latin alphabet used to write down English. This is not a coincidence! Some old legends say that long time ago, when humans and ponies lived together and inhabited the same world yet undivided, humans had peeked some of these symbols and used them to build their own alphabet upon them. After the Great Divide, when both worlds had become separated, human version of those letters evolved in a very different way than in the equine world. But one can still notice some resemblance of the original letters. For now, ignore the third and fourth column about phonetics, since it is an old version where I was still experimenting with different sounds for these letters, and it is wrong. I think I already solved the phonetics, in a different way, and I'll show you in a minute how it works. You will be excited when you see it The next column describes what the particular glyph depicts by its shape. This will be a basis for deciphering its meaning. Nothing is known about the correct alphabetical ordering of these letters, so I put them in such an order that they begin from a pony, then there are several important body parts of a pony (from head to tail), and then there are the glyphs related to the pony's environment: first two are related to the Heavens above, and the last one in this group (a thunder) is about the sky. The last one in the table is a rope, which is the most primitive tool used by ponies since the prehistoric times of G1 ;-J We don't know if this is the entire alphabet. Perhaps there were some other symbols too, but it is quite unlikely – if there were any more symbols, why wouldn't they appear in the sample we've seen in Twilight's book? I once had this idea that when Ancient Alicorns came to Earth and taught ponies their language, they gave different parts of their alphabet to different races of ponies: there's a common subset for all of the races, but each race has a bunch of their own symbols particular to their race. E.g. Pegasi could have symbols of a wing, a cloud, or a rainbow, because those are things they usually deal with. Earth Ponies could have symbols for a tree (or a general plant), an apple (or a general fruit), a seed etc. Other races can express those ideas, too, but they need to combine other symbols into words to make these meanings. It's just that some races can write down these ideas shorter, since they use them all the time. The common Equestrian language and writing could be based on this common subset of symbols, or it could be a completely separate thing. Meanings and how to combine them Now, each glyph of the Unicorn Language has its own meaning. These basic meanings could be combined together into longer sequences called "words" to make new, more sophisticated meanings. E.g. if the thunder means "loud", and the head means "thought", then together they mean "loud thought" which is "speech". Similarly, if the horseshoe means to make a mark, and the head means "thought", then together they mean "idea leaving a mark", which is "writing". This way one can combine simple meanings into more complex meaning and create longer words. And the whole language would make a big tree of meanings, with the most general meanings at their roots, and the more specific words branching from them. I'll discuss this root-branch tree-like structure later. This is how all ancient languages (like Hebrew, Arabic, Sanskrit etc.) worked, and it is a very neat idea, because when you encounter some new word you've never seen before, you can still figure out its meaning by looking at what symbols it is made of and combining their meanings. You can also guess a new word when you want to express some meaning but you don't know any word which says that. This is contrary to how modern languages (like English) work, where the letters of a word would tell you nothing about its meaning, and you need to remember a whole lot of dictionary (or carry it along wherever you go) to be able to communicate. Position is everything Now here's another interesting feature of the Unicorn language: Each of these alphabetic symbols, or words made of them, can have different meanings depending on where in the sentence they appear (but these meanings are still somehow related). This way one doesn't need to remember different words for different occasions, because the same word can perform different roles depending on whether it is a noun (that is, a name of something), a verb (a word describing action), or an adjective (describing a property or trait). For example, the same word can mean "a ruler" when used as a noun, "to rule" when used as a verb, and "ruling" when used as an adjective. This trick allowed me... erm, I mean, allowed Unicorns to slim down their vocabulary and move that weight somewhere else: into grammar. That is, instead of having a large dictionary of thousands of words, they can go with less words which can have different meanings depending on where they appear in the sentence, and the grammar rules will do all the rest. Prefixes and suffixes These symbols can also be used as affixes, that is, they can be attached before or after other words (as prefixes or suffixes) to modify their meaning a bit. For example, you can turn a concrete word, such as "friends", into a more abstract idea: "friendship", by prefixing it with the head symbol (meaning a "thought" or "idea"; a thought of being friends is friendship). (You can see an example of that in my signature at the bottom of my every post.) Fun fact: You might have noticed in my signature that to make the word "friends", a pony needs to connect two symbols of a pony facing each other, with a rope between them symbolizing the emotional bond which connects them as friends. But there is no way to make a word "friend" in singular! This is not a mistake, but it reflects the idea that there are two to tango. So, for example, Applejack can say "Me and Rarity friends" ("I'm friends with Rarity"), but she cannot say "Rarity is my friend" nor "I'm a friend of Rarity", because friendship has to be mutual. A pony cannot declare friendship one-sidedly, either way. She can say "I like Rarity" at most. If she said "Me and Rarity friends", it is implied that the relationship is mutual. You might have also noticed that in my table the meanings become gradually dimmer and dimmer. This shows the progression from concrete ideas to more abstract ones. This table is a second version, evolved from the first one I presented in my other thread. It seems pretty firm, but it can still change a bit in a future, so keep this in mind. Now let's talk about phonetics, that is, how these letters could sound. Phonetics The following image shows an anatomy of the vocal tract of a pony: DISCLAIMER: No pony has been hurt in making this illustration ;-J This is a result of a special "see-thru" spell, which causes some parts of an object to become invisible and fully transparent, still being there at their usual place. Pretty cool, eh? ;-J As you can see, the vocal tract of a pony has a similar structure as in humans (yeah, Nature likes to reuse good & attested designs ;-J ). This means that ponies are capable of producing all the same sounds humans can. But the Unicorn Language is meant to be simple and easy to pronounce, so it uses only a bunch of sounds separated far away from each other in the vocal tract so they could be easily distinguished by ear. Consonants and vowels There are two distinct types of sounds which can be produced: consonants and vowels. Vowels are the sounds which are produced with an unobstructed air flow through the vocal tract, and can be sustained deliberately long (well, at least until the breath ends). They are easy to produce, and they are the very first sounds every living animal can produce (if it can produce any sounds at all). But they are also easy to confuse, because they all sound very similar. Consonants, on the other hand, are produced by making obstacles in the vocal tract and "disturbing" the air flow in different ways. They have very distinct sounds so they are easier to recognize by ear. This makes them perfect for communicating meanings through speech. Vowels are the "carrier wave", which is being "modulated" by the consonants. That's why it is the consonants in a word that matter and carry the most of the meaning. They make which is called a "root" of a word. Vowels between the consonants, on the other hand, can change, and this doesn't change the meaning of the word, only slightly (e.g. changing its mood, or tense, things like that). That's why the Unicorn Language originally used alphabetic symbols only to write down consonants. But if there could be some confusion about the meaning of the word, some of these consonantal sounds has been reused to double as vowels. But before I'll jump into the details, let me tell you first how I finally figured out the phonetics puzzle. Solving phonetics (cool story) As you could have seen in my previous thread, I had a great difficulty with figuring out what sound to associate with each of these letters. I was banging my head for a long time, trying different combinations of sounds. I was thinking about what sounds could be natural to produce for ponies, and I even once invented a somewhat exotic sound which, in my opinion, would be easy to produce by horses, but doesn't appear in any human language: a strange "prr" sound horses sometimes made. Later it turned out that there actually is such a sound in the International Phonetics Language (IPA), and it is called "bilabial trill". If you want to hear how it sounds, there's a sound sample on Wikipedia. Pretty funny, eh? Unfortunately I couldn't incorporate this sound in the language, it didn't fit well with other sounds, so I dropped this idea. Let's say this sound has been used by primitive ponies when Ancient Aliconrs taught them their language for the first time, but with time it's been simplified to just "p" or "b" sound. Up to that time, I tried lots of different combinations of sounds, but none of them worked well. So I decided to summon Twilight Sparkle in my mind and ask her what their letters sound like. Unfortunately, Twilight wasn't much helpful, she avoided my questions with the smile of Mona Lisa ;-J But she told me that this is a magical language, so I need to understand Magic first, to understand the language :-J So I did. I took the two symbols for "bright" and "dark" (that is, the Sun/star and Moon), and combined with the symbol of a Unicorn horn, which symbolizes Magic. I also attached the head suffix to make them abstract ideas (of Magic as an idea) instead of some concrete "stuff" (magical energy). This way I made two important words: Bright Magic and Dark Magic – the basic driving forces of the whole Universe. In our world, they're called Yin and Yang by the Chinese. I thought that if these symbols mean the same in Unicorn, they should sound somewhat similar. I already had some words invented, but no matter how I tried to assign some sounds to the Bright Magic and Dark Magic words, the same sounds didn't fit in these other words ;-/ And then I've got another idea: What about reusing some letters as vowels? And it turned out that this works magically! If I assign the "j" sound (as in "jaw" or "judge") to the horn, and the "n" sound to the head, and then use vowel sounds for the Sun and Moon – the "a" sound (as in "arm") for the Sun and the "i" sound (English "ee" as in "bee", or "yi" as in "yield"), then see what we get (and hold on to your hooves): horn + star + head = j + i + n = jin (pronounced as "geen") horn + moon + head = j + a + n = jan See? They sound very similar to those Chinese words "yin" and "yang" for Dark Magic and Bright Magic! Moreover, the first one (for Dark Magic) is related to "genie", a mischievous magical spirit captured in a bottle which uses Magic (supposedly the dark one) to make your wishes come true. When we combinine Bright Magic and Dark Magic to make Harmony: star + horn + moon = a + j + i = aji (pronounced somewhat like "agee") Now look what we get when we add a symbol of a pony in front of it, to make it mean a pony who mastered both sides of Magic, Bright and Dark, and can use them in harmony: pony + star + horn + moon = m + a + j + i = maji (!!!) Guess what the Ancients called those wise men who knew a lot and supposedly could use magical powers: they were called Maggi In modern English there are words based on that old word, such as "magician" or "mage". Also, when one assign the obvious clopping sound ("k" or "q") to the horseshoe, we can attach it at the end of this word to get "majiq", which means "a mark made by the pony who can harmonize bright and dark energy", or in short: a magical inscription, a spell. So it all fits perfectly! As you will see later, these sounds also fit well with other words I invented before, relating to family. But I'll talk about that later, when I'll be explaining you the vocabulary. Now let's get back to phonetics of the letters. Names of the letters and default vowels Each consonant letter has its own name, which is simply a one-syllable word. This word isn't random, it has a meaning: it means the same thing which the shape of the letter depicts. This one-syllable word is also a hint about the pronunciation of that letter, and it has a default vowel associated with it. Here are the names of the letters, their pronunciation, their consonant sounds, and their default vowel sounds: a pony = mah = m a head = nah = n a horn = jah = j (as in "judge") an eye= voh = v (as in "void"); vowel sound: o (as in "vote") a horseshoe = qu = q (as in "quiet"); vowel sound: u (as in "put" or "foot") a tail = i don't know yet; perhaps "r" or"l" the Sun = 'ah = ' (yes, this is a consonant, so called "glottal stop", more on that below); vowel sound: a (as in "hat") the Moon = yi = y (an approximant consonant, as in "yeti" or "young"); vowel sound: i (as in "meet") a thunder = dhah / zhah = dh / z (I haven't decided yet; but it has to have a buzzing sound and somewhat violent and explosive) a rope = heh = h (as in "head"); vowel sound: e (as in "head" or "Equestria") As you can see, some of the sounds are still to figure out, but I pretty much have them all in place. As to the "glottal stop": it is a sound made when you close your glottis and stop the air flow (that's where the name comes from). A similar sound to when you're about to cough. If this description is not clear enough, I'll try to record some sound samples later. If you're a bit confused with all this pronunciation stuff, don't worry. At the end of this post I'll put a link to a website I'm currently constructing, with a simple Unicorn-English dictionary, where you can see some example words: how they are written in Unicorn alphabet, how to transcribe them in PEGASCII, and how to pronounce them, and there you can hear the pronunciation of each word by clicking on it. Vocabulary Speaking of the vocabulary, I already invented a whole bunch of words in Unicorn Language. But when the rules of creating them would be settled enough, I'll invite you to the fun and maybe together we can work faster to complete the whole dictionary. But for now, let me show you what I've got already. Family relations The following picture shows a bunch of words Unicorns use to name their family members: It all begins in the "Generation 0". When a Unicorn is born, the first ponies he or she meets are his/her parents, of course ("Generation -1"). The words to name them should be short, simple, easy to distinguish, and easy to pronounce by an infant pony. And that's how I made them. "Mei" is "mother", "Me'ah" is "father", and "meh" is "parent" in general (gender-neutral). The names of other family members are longer, but still quite simple to pronounce. If you look closely at this picture, you should notice a whole lot of patterns. First of all, each of these words contains at least one rope symbol. That's because the rope symbolizes a bond, either emotional or a bloodline. But this symbol appears at different positions. And there's a pattern in that, too :> Imagine you are the pony who speaks about his relatives. Imagine you and your family are standing in a line, ordered by generations: the ponies from previous generations are behind you (or up the tree), and the next generations are in front of you. And you are holding a rope which symbolizes the bond connecting you to some other pony. When you speak about your parents, the rope is behind you, and more behind is a pony which is your parent. So, in the correct order of appearance in a word, they are: a pony, a rope, and you (which is the default, so you don't need to symbolize it with any picture). If, on the other hand, you want to speak about your children (the next generation), then the rope leading to them is in front of you, and then there's a pony. So the order in a word is this: you (default, not written), a rope, a pony. So a child (gender-neutral) is "'em", a colt is "'emah", and a filly is "'emi"). For ponies which are more distant in generations (grandparents before, and grandchildren after), you simply use more rope symbols between you and the pony you speak about. You can also see that each of the words has a gender-neutral form, which is modified to specify a gender by attaching one of the two "natural opposites" symbols: the Sun or the Moon. The Sun is for masculine forms, because males like to spread their presence all around and be visible, so as the Sun. The Moon is for feminine forms, because it attracts water with its gravity, causing tides, and females are attractive and attract other ponies. They can also pull them by their "gravity of love". You know what I mean... That's how it works for me, and that's how these symbols were used by humans in ancient cultures, so let's simply reuse it for ponies too. Below each of the words there's also its plural form. You can see that it is made by doubling some particular symbols and their syllables in a word. The rule is: If there's any pony symbol in a word, double that. If there isn't, double the last syllable of the root before attaching any prefixes or suffixes. You can also notice some oddity in this diagram: Ponies from the same generation (i.e. your siblings) have single rope. Why is that? Well, there must be at least one rope to tell that we're speaking about a family member (a pony which is connected to me with a bond). Two ropes would be too much, since it would suggest a pony from two generations apart. So we end up with just one rope. But then it conflicts with parents, which are one generation above. How to differ them from siblings, which are on the same generation level? Well, I had some trouble with it, but finally I figured out that I can simply reverse the pony symbol so that it would be facing towards me. This makes him a bit "closer" to me than my parents or my children. When you want to pronounce such a word with a reversed glyph, simply reverse the syllable: put its default vowel before the consonant instead of after it. There are other familym members beside those shown in the above illustration. But they can be easily described by joining words together. For example "grandma's mother" is "great-grandmother". "Father's brother" is "uncle" etc. Since the words are short, they can be easily joined this way. Remember the "Baby Cakes" episode where Mr. Cake was describing the family relations of some of his family members? In English translation it sounded long and complicated, but in pony language it was shorter and more structured, so ponies have no troubles with understanding these connections. Personal pronouns Repeating one's name in a sentence over and over when addressing him would be cumbersome. That's why personal pronouns has been invented in almost every human language. They are short words used in place of longer nouns to facilitate referencing them in sentences. For example, instead of saying "Spike hungry, Spike wants some gemstones", Spike can simply say "I am hungry, I want some gemstones." Or, Instead of saying "This is Twilight Sparkle. Twilight Sparkle is smart.", one can simply say: "This is Twilight Sparkle. She is smart.", and everyone understands that "she" refers to Twilight Sparkle. There are personal pronouns in Unicorn language, too. And you will be surprised how easy they are to use! (I deliberately made them to be that way.) First of all, the words for personal pronouns evolved from simple nouns. For example, a noun "pony" (which is a one-symbol word – just a pony symbol! pronounced "mah") can be reused to mean the same as "one" or "someone" in English ("somepony" in Unicorn language). This form is the gender-neutral one, which is missing in English (unless one considers "one" to be this word). When a pony wants to distinguish the gender, it's enough to attach the Sun (star) or the Moon symbol at the end of it. Then it will mean "he" or "she" (pronounced "mei" or "me'ah"). Those are all third person singular pronouns. So what about first person and second person singular? Well, you can turn the third person into second person by turning the pony symbol to its mirror image. Now the pony is facing you, so it means "you" (or "the pony I talk with", contrary to "the pony I speak of" when it is turned backs to me). For first person, I decided to use the head symbol, because it reminds me "myself". The head is where my consciousness is located, and where my eyes and ears and mouth are located, it's the "origin of my world", so it quite fits as "I" (or "the pony who speaks that"). As to the plural forms of personal pronouns, ponies doesn't have them. This might seem surprising to you at first, since in English, and many other human languages, there are such plural forms. How can a pony say "we" if there isn't a word for it in his/her language?! Well, the pony can simply say "me and you", or "me and him", or "me and her". Since these personal pronouns are so short (one to two letters!), they can be easily bunched this way. One can even consider such a pair of words as one word, and ponies often write them down this way (they even join them with following words as prefixes if it is not ambiguous). If you still have issues with that, think of it this way: In English, when you say "you" or "they", there's no information about the gender of the particular members of the group! In other languages, like Polish or French, there are different forms for masculine or feminine groups. But this is ridiculous! If you don't see why, then imagine a group of mixed gender: are they "them males" or "them females"? None of them fits, since the group contains both males and females! But languages which use such forms, force one of these genders, usually masculine, as if one male in the group "plagued" the whole group by his masculinity This is very chauvinistic or sexist rule, and ponies don't like chauvinism or sexism – they prefer tolerance and equality. That's why they don't force genders where it doesn't fit, and distinguish gender where it should be distinguished instead of mixing it. If they don't want to specify gender, they use gender-neutral forms (lacking in many human languages). If they need to specify gender, they mix the appropriate gender-specific personal pronouns together. Of course, the concept of gender applies only to animate words (i.e. living things), which actually have gender. For inanimate objects, distinguishing gender doesn't make any sense, so for such objects Unicorns use separate pronouns. For example, the symbol of a horseshoe, which means "it", and is pronounced "qu" or "ku". (Interestingly, a similar words means "thing" in Chinese, as far as I know). This form doesn't have gender-specific forms. Why a horseshoe for that? Because it represents a hoof, and ponies hold objects, touch them, grab them and point at them with their hooves. Makes sense? ;-J Human languages often enforce some artificial gender to inanimate objects, which is very confusing, because one needs to remember not only a word, but also its gender. To make it even more confusing, different languages assign different gender to the same things (e.g. a spoon in Polish is "she" and a fork is "he", but in Italian it's the other way around). There is a reason for doing this trick in human languages: this artificial gender is used along with gender-specific personal pronouns and gender-specific endings of adjectives to let you know which one is connected to which. But this works as far as there aren't words with the same gender in the same sentence, so it has a limit anyway. That's why I don't introduced such pesky rules in Unicorn language. For matching adjectives with their nouns, and pronouns with the nouns they replace, other rules are used, which I'll describe some other time. Here's a table which summarizes these personal pronouns in the Unicorn Language: As you can see, they're very simple and regular. They're also short, so they can be bunched together or connected with other words (so called pronomial affixes). So they are much easier to use than in human languages and you should be able to learn them easily. Oh, I almost forgot: Here's the Unicorn-English dictionary I was speaking about previously, all with spelling and pronunciation, so you can hear how these words sound by clicking on them. The website is a work in progress. If anypony wants to help me with it (especially with the graphics design – it still begs for some cool banner), send me a private message. OK, let's call it enough for now. I'm curious how you see these ideas, so all comments and suggestions are welcome. Next time I'll answer your questions (if you have any), and I'll try to post some more stuff.

This might give some interesting results. Given that MLP Forums is on the international English-speaking web, intuition would say that most would likely be from primarily English-speaking countries. The reason I chose to put attention on the language of the national anthem is because that language would most likely be a big part of that culture's identity. Perhaps not totally (I'm looking at you, Quebec) but large enough.

I know that usually it's odd to ask someone what their favorite words are, but sometimes there are words that you just love using, or are just plain fun to say. Some of my favorites are: Serendipity Plunder Quaint Nebulous Discombobulate Papal Oblivion Guinness Pony

I was just wondering, are you currently learning a new language? If so, which one(s)? If not, are you planning on learning a new language anytime soon? I'm currently learning Burmese. When I visited Myanmar (Burma) I immediately fell in love with the language and I just had to learn it. It's so beautiful

Why is it acceptable in society to say poop, but you can't say shit? They both mean the same thing, so why is one more acceptable than the other? Or sometimes how people use the word shit in place of stuff. Example, "I have got to try this shit." I feel that unless you are swear at somebody (Ex: Fuck you, you son of a bitch, shithead, etc.) it really isn't that big of a deal. Also, the word shit is just a slang word for poop, so why is it so bad? Let me know how you guys feel about curse words.

IS there anymore instances that show the Ponies having there own written language like is shown in this episode (The Show Stoppers) because there language seems to consist of ϟ, ♞, ★, ☾, ☋, and a few others that I can't find (Swirl, Unicorn Horn, Leaf, etc.)...

Hello Everypony! Sooooo.. I was just curious. The world is vast. And the Earth is, too. There are many countries, and many more languages and dialects! So, what does "biscuit" translate into your language and (optional: dialect)? In Malay, the word "biscuit" translates into "biskut", but in my dialect, the Kelantanese dialect, we call them "Sekut" (you'll have to press it on the S for it to sound right. But not too much that it sounds weird and absurd. e.g. SSekut) Well whad'ya know, you learn new things everyday! Twilight must've been proud of us! Well, I didn't know these translated into soo many different words! Diversity makes us different, yet it NEVER sets us apart. And it wouldn't ever! ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. “ If we cannot now end our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. John F. Kennedy ...................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

So I was watching some videos about accents, and I thought it would be cool to have a discussion about accents from our regions. So, lets talk about how silly we talk, or the people around us at least. I'm from Massachusetts, I really don't have much of an accent nor do most people I know, but I do notice I do sometimes say words a certain way sometimes although I think its subtle when it does comes out, but then again I might sound super off to somebody out of my region and I just don't notice. So here is a video of a lady speaking with the Boston accent, and she is so right about people faking the accent and calling it BAHHHSTON.

There are a lot of very interesting words some with multiple meanings and even a few synonyms and some of us have a favorite word. My favorite word is the "F word", because it has a very nice ring to it and is a fairly versatile word that can be used in some particularly interesting ways. There is its literal context and of course as an insult, another way of describing getting ripped off or flim flammed and more. Even though it is my favorite I don't use it all that much because it does lose its power if used too much and there are certain situations where it might not be the best or place for it. So what is everyones favorite word?

I was thinking about creating a realistic portrayal of how language(s) would develop in Equestria. Of course you would have different language families, most likely divided by the different sentient species in their world; the equine languages, the griffin languages, the draconic languages, etc. Each would have their own unique history, dialects, grammar, phonetics, and more importantly lexicon, which would be highly influenced by their culture and way of life. Now let’s focus on the Ponies’ languages, or possibly a common Equestrian language that would have developed with the unification of the tribes. I was thinking they could develop an interesting noun classification system based on three groups; Earth/Terrequine, Sky/Pegasian, and Magic/Monocerous. This classification would not only apply to the types of ponies themselves, but reflect in how they view the world. Their names could take on the appropriate endings depending on if they were an earth pony, pegasus, or unicorn, and all nouns would get classified into one of those three groups; the ‘earth’ group for more earth-oriented things, the ‘sky’ group for sky-oriented things, and the ‘magic’ group for more abstract concepts. This could even apply to a single noun, where changing that noun’s ending or classification would change its meaning. Let’s make a word in example; perhaps la phona could mean “the tree” in earth form, then le phone could mean “the cloud” in sky form, and li phoni could mean “the pony (sentient individual; conscience)” in the magic form. (This is just for example; if I really make this language, there will be much more thought put into making it natural and have historical context with phonetic changes, irregularities, historic spelling rules, etc.) Now historically, among the three tribes, each one would’ve had their own distinct dialect of a “proto-equestrian” language, which would eventually shape the accents, dialects and colloquialisms of their modern counterparts. The unicorns’ language would’ve probably been more archaic and formed the basis for the standardisation of modern equestrian grammar; hence, people from Canterlot and aristocratic unicorns/ponies tend to speak very clearly with a distinct accent and word choice that could possibly sound ‘posh’ and ‘ritzy’ to other ponies. You could even have a similar thing to English where, after the invasion of Normandy, we took words from French, which took on a more pretentious and sophisticated feel as they were used by the aristocracy, yet we also retained the same words from Anglo-Saxon which have a lower register as they were used by the commoners or working class. So words from historic Unicorn language would sound more formal and sophisticated, while perhaps words originating from Earth Ponies would sound more simple. The earth ponies would also develop many accents and dialects of this modern Equestrian language based on their historic language(s), which could be perceived by other ponies to be very ‘country’ or ‘rustic’ (i.e. Applejack and the Apple family). Of course in modern Equestrian times these colloquialisms won’t always hold true solely based on a pony’s type; for example, Octavia is an Earth Pony who speaks kind of poshly or ‘properly’. You could also have unique accents arising in the city, for example Babs’ accent. Princess Luna, then, would speak a very archaic, unicornish form of the Equestrian language, possibly an Early Modern Equestrian language based in Canterlot (comparable to Early Modern English). If I continue through with this idea of documenting/creating a theoretical linguistic background for Equestria and constructing actual languages, I’ll probably post my progress here. Maybe one day we can have actual language courses and an entire community speaking an Equestrian language? That would be amazing. I’ll try to develop this more when I can, and hopefully I’ll have an actual speakable language underway soon. I will, however, probably have to start with an experimental Equestrian language first, before I start something serious, to kind of get an idea of how it would turn out and to get a basis for the whole thing. So what are your thoughts on all of this? Any extra ideas or Equestrian history you'd like to point out that may contribute to this?

Does somebody here sometimes watch the show in a foreign dub? I prefer the English original version, but I like languages and their differences and many songs sound a lot better in French and Finnisch, but Greek, German, Arabic and Russian sound nice too.