Xenolinguistics Discussion

Think about language in Mass Effect and your head will crack open. There is no point doing so unless you want to stress and confuse yourself.

An asari-run, largely anti-human space station called Omega, for instance?

A salarian-founded group named after a human concept with the acronym based on words from a human language?

And the point is to figure out a way to rationalize certain problems within canon so they're not as immersion-breaking.

I'm sure there's a way to, but to my language student head I couldn't find any way to reconcile it all, so I tried to stop thinking about it early on.

If you do find a way/explanation, I would love to hear it!

I picked up on all of these and it bothered me a lot, especially some of PeeBee's lines. Occasionally Jaal points out that he doesn't understand idioms, but Peebee uses them freely without any explanation.

I do accept certain narrative conventions for the sake of the player's comprehension, but only up to a point, and I appreciate the creators at least attempting to make an in-game explanation for them. For example, the way that the player hears aliens speaking is not the way that Shepard or Ryder would actually hear them, but I certainly prefer it to the jarring gibberish loops from KOTOR and Jade Empire while I'm trying to read the subtitles.

Now you know how Physicist must feel about Bioware's approach to FTL and the Theory of Relativity. At least they try and explain away language issues by the use of translators, VI and AI. When it comes to the Theory of Relativity they just TOTALLY ignore it.

Mass Effect languages and cultural interoperability have been magic from the start, from the fact that we don't simultaneously hear the 'actual' speach sounds right down to the anthromorphism of emotions to the robots, so I'm not sure why it's a problem now...?

(Unless this is just an old gripe, in which case gripe away. I love griping about some pet peaves, like the backstory timelines of the original story.)


One thing I do think/wish the ME team would do at some point is make a plot point of removing the translators from dramatic impact in a moment of crisis. Imagine if- in ME2, or MEA- the ship/team got hit by a cyberweapon that dismantled the team's translators, and suddenly no one is able to talk to eachother- not even the humans, because by lore there is no common human language.

So instead, we have a segment where we hear what alien languages actually sound like- insert appropriate starwards style funny sound loops- even as we find other ways to communicate. Hand and arm signals. Charades. Just falling back on ingrained trust and habbits, as we slowly come together as an effective team even as capabilities are (very) slowly restored.

It'd be a great moment of proving that we don't nee the technology to come together, and that our bonds/abilities are reliable even without it.

IIRC they had a professor from U of A to work on Jade Empire's Old Tongue.

Their projects grew in complexity and manpower so much since then. I think if I can manage the Modern Dark Ages in DA, I can give them a break with just a smattering of cute words and some e-mails from Jaal explaining the Angaran Word of the Week.

No Gumby? No wonder the Reapers act like such blockheads.

"And as much as Peebee has some fun dialogue and is a relatively interesting character, a bit of my soul dies whenever she opens her mouth. One "I spy with my little eye something that starts with 'M'" and I want to murder a writer. I could maybe understand her learning the game from humans on the Nexus while she was bored out of her mind, but most of Peebee's lines in general would require fluency in English AT THE VERY LEAST," 

I'm not even a linguist and that bothered the heck out of me. I might let her get away with one or two puns or purely english speaking idioms or whatevers but so much of her dialogue is written with a familiarity with the english language that it just didn't fly with me and truly irritated me..

*twitches* ERROR BRAIN SHUTTING DOWN