Hyacinthium
Writing about sad cannibals as we speak.
- Location
- Bedroom
- Pronouns
- He/Him
High heels for skaven?
Revolt-Revolution, Yes-Yes! (CK2 Skaven Post-Revolution Quest)
- Thread starter The Laurent
- Start date
- Fantasy Users' Choice!
Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
I've always felt the Tallboys from Dishonored were an extremely skaven war machine.
I've always felt the Tallboys from Dishonored were an extremely skaven war machine.
Who's tiny-small now!?
- Pronouns
- Reader
Now I'm imagining a skaven outsider equivalent and how it would act out the various scenes of Dishonored 1 and 2.I've always felt the Tallboys from Dishonored were an extremely skaven war machine.
Informational--So Much As To Be Understood: Language In The Under-Empire
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Informational--So Much As To Be Understood: Language In The Under-Empire
If you want an idea of the past of the Under-Empire, imagine a boot stamping on a ratty face… forever.
But then it ended.
They don't tell that story, do they? A system built to destroy cannot sustain itself forever. And yet, the Skaven did it for so long.
They had their Thousand Year Empire, and then it kept on going.
On and on.
No history of the Skaven can actually be written, because so much of it is unwritten or erased. A thousand cultural movements strangled in the cradle, a thousand ambitious Napoleons for a new way challenged into a system of self-destruction, everything that might have been better, or even less bad--bog standard authoritarianism would seem like a paradise to the average Skaven--destroyed and crushed.
And a tool of control, a tool of power, that they always used was a simple one… language.
This is a run-through of the language groups of the Under-Empire, and a story of how even perfect systems of repression fail and tumble.
The language of religion, the language of power, the language of the elite. Usually even the most technical language can be spoke of in any tongue. And language, ultimately, exists to be said Spoken. Known. Even if the higher diction and complex sentence structure are marks of the elite they are marks that are not different from the masses.
Not so here.
High Queekish is designed to be obtuse, precise, frustrating and bizarre as possible, a language that the average Skaven had neither the time nor patience to learn.
Yet at the same time, it was the language that their masters spoke, and the language that Clanrats learned in bits and pieces. Someone like Sarry could read, squinting, a piece of bureaucratic legalese, and a similar level of understanding came with jobs regarded as crucial, except for war.
As a language and a culture, it did mostly lack the latter. There were some songs, and some poems and attempts to account and lie about great deeds done by this or that Skaven in flowery, high-flown language. But ironically it is the Clan Eshin semi-Noh play that quotes the Skaven view on culture of the sort like literature and poetry, and even and especially any lower-class culture. "When I hear-listen to the world 'culture' I reach-grab for my Warplock, yes-yes."
Skaven listened to music at all levels of society, enjoyed wealth and power and all sorts of forms of access to authority and yet what they enjoyed wasn't the art of the world, but the riches and wealth, the power. Wealth and power had their privileges, but taste was perhaps not one of them.
In theory each clan has or had their own version that's entirely different and hard for another clan to understand as a means to be secretive. In practice they're all dialects of each other. It's what the Slaverats are expected to speak to their superiors and among each other, and what Clanrats are expected to speak at all times except pertaining to their job. It's slang and dialect and deliberate obfuscation all rolled into one.
It's the tongue that Skaven are supposed to speak, and it's one that for all its flaws is mostly just… a language. Sometimes a language that tries too hard to make sure each version of it distinguishes itself from the other, but a language and a real one. Like any language it grew and changed over time, albeit like a hothouse garden, managed carefully and exactingly by those whose job it was to regulate it. The Skaven had no language academy to determine exactly how the language was to progress, but only because they were too divided. If they had, they would have stagnated this living language even more.
Because to be pinned down like a butterfly on a board is to be easy to hit.
Low Queekish is not supposed to be a language. It's meant to be a pidgin used on and by slaves, whereas even Skavenslaves are supposed to be able to feel superior that they know halting and rough Clan Queekish of one clan or another. As a pidgin, Low Queekish lacks many of the tenses, indicators, and more. It is designed, and successfully designed, as an entry-point for Goblins, Orcs, and humans to understanding what their masters are telling them to do. It is meant for nothing more or nothing less than that.
But if you know languages, you know that pidgins become creoles in the same way that anything does: it accrues, and then it becomes so. So what happened, are Skaven and slaves just unable to actually make those obvious connections?
No.
It's the same reason there have never been any Skaven slave revolts, or Skaven who reject the Horned Rat.
There is "the type" of Low Queekish that they teach, and there's the Creole that has risen up again and again. But they cannot tolerate it. They kill or send to their deaths those Skaven who speak it, and same with the slaves, and they isolate those who might learn it. Time and again a Creole has formed, been found out, and destroyed as languages can be.
Time and time again, Low Queekish has reached out to become something more and succeeded. It did not even always come with anything like class-consciousness of course. Just because one speaks the same language with someone of a different species or race doesn't mean one sees them as equal or worthy or equally a person.
But even the risk that it might one day, in the distant future, become sympathy or a language of revolt, even some conservative revolt going, "We should be the slave owners, not the Clan leaders" is unacceptable.
And so language dies.
Again and again.
Dies and dies. Is reborn.
Dies some more.
Each birth and death is not the exact same: a Creole changes depending on a thousand factors. The Clan of the Skaven, the composition of the slaves and underlings, the fads and habits at the time. Each new "full" Low Queekish was not the same as some past complete Low-Queekish creole.
But they were all striving for the same thing.
A thousand movements, a thousand cultural trends, a thousand bits of slang form like a shell around Queekish and are scraped off.
Exterminated.
That's the thing, nothing. Over a decade or two, a creole rose up, hidden as these things tended to be, but this time starting several years ago the leadership of Clan Rictus began focusing on taking more slaves and acquired them even faster than they could churn through them, which is what they usually did. They missed it, it seems, missed the language forming up. Missed the sympathy.
They missed everything, and now they are dead, but Low Queekish is not.
It is still not fully a language. It has bits that need to be filled in. It lacks a lot of the technical and bureaucratic loan-words needed. It's not a language that has at the moment produced any great poems or songs.
But it's real, it's alive, and it's yours. It breathes in phrases like WAAAGH and "slappable-face" from Reikspiel and breathes out a habit of repetition-emphasis and clarification-qualification, yes-yes.
It is alive, and the Horned Rat and the Under-Empire are dead.
Nothing will ever be the same anymore.
While the Skaven cannot know about the vast past of revolt and dissent, culture and slang and life that came before them--and it is written nowhere, recording for nothing--they are the heirs of those who spoke very differently from them long ago, but spoke of the same thing: Freedom.
If you want an idea of the past of the Under-Empire, imagine a boot stamping on a ratty face… forever.
But then it ended.
They don't tell that story, do they? A system built to destroy cannot sustain itself forever. And yet, the Skaven did it for so long.
They had their Thousand Year Empire, and then it kept on going.
On and on.
No history of the Skaven can actually be written, because so much of it is unwritten or erased. A thousand cultural movements strangled in the cradle, a thousand ambitious Napoleons for a new way challenged into a system of self-destruction, everything that might have been better, or even less bad--bog standard authoritarianism would seem like a paradise to the average Skaven--destroyed and crushed.
And a tool of control, a tool of power, that they always used was a simple one… language.
This is a run-through of the language groups of the Under-Empire, and a story of how even perfect systems of repression fail and tumble.
High Queekish
The language of religion, the language of power, the language of the elite. Usually even the most technical language can be spoke of in any tongue. And language, ultimately, exists to be said Spoken. Known. Even if the higher diction and complex sentence structure are marks of the elite they are marks that are not different from the masses.
Not so here.
High Queekish is designed to be obtuse, precise, frustrating and bizarre as possible, a language that the average Skaven had neither the time nor patience to learn.
Yet at the same time, it was the language that their masters spoke, and the language that Clanrats learned in bits and pieces. Someone like Sarry could read, squinting, a piece of bureaucratic legalese, and a similar level of understanding came with jobs regarded as crucial, except for war.
As a language and a culture, it did mostly lack the latter. There were some songs, and some poems and attempts to account and lie about great deeds done by this or that Skaven in flowery, high-flown language. But ironically it is the Clan Eshin semi-Noh play that quotes the Skaven view on culture of the sort like literature and poetry, and even and especially any lower-class culture. "When I hear-listen to the world 'culture' I reach-grab for my Warplock, yes-yes."
Skaven listened to music at all levels of society, enjoyed wealth and power and all sorts of forms of access to authority and yet what they enjoyed wasn't the art of the world, but the riches and wealth, the power. Wealth and power had their privileges, but taste was perhaps not one of them.
Clan Queekish
In theory each clan has or had their own version that's entirely different and hard for another clan to understand as a means to be secretive. In practice they're all dialects of each other. It's what the Slaverats are expected to speak to their superiors and among each other, and what Clanrats are expected to speak at all times except pertaining to their job. It's slang and dialect and deliberate obfuscation all rolled into one.
It's the tongue that Skaven are supposed to speak, and it's one that for all its flaws is mostly just… a language. Sometimes a language that tries too hard to make sure each version of it distinguishes itself from the other, but a language and a real one. Like any language it grew and changed over time, albeit like a hothouse garden, managed carefully and exactingly by those whose job it was to regulate it. The Skaven had no language academy to determine exactly how the language was to progress, but only because they were too divided. If they had, they would have stagnated this living language even more.
Because to be pinned down like a butterfly on a board is to be easy to hit.
Low Queekish
Low Queekish is not supposed to be a language. It's meant to be a pidgin used on and by slaves, whereas even Skavenslaves are supposed to be able to feel superior that they know halting and rough Clan Queekish of one clan or another. As a pidgin, Low Queekish lacks many of the tenses, indicators, and more. It is designed, and successfully designed, as an entry-point for Goblins, Orcs, and humans to understanding what their masters are telling them to do. It is meant for nothing more or nothing less than that.
But if you know languages, you know that pidgins become creoles in the same way that anything does: it accrues, and then it becomes so. So what happened, are Skaven and slaves just unable to actually make those obvious connections?
No.
It's the same reason there have never been any Skaven slave revolts, or Skaven who reject the Horned Rat.
There is "the type" of Low Queekish that they teach, and there's the Creole that has risen up again and again. But they cannot tolerate it. They kill or send to their deaths those Skaven who speak it, and same with the slaves, and they isolate those who might learn it. Time and again a Creole has formed, been found out, and destroyed as languages can be.
Time and time again, Low Queekish has reached out to become something more and succeeded. It did not even always come with anything like class-consciousness of course. Just because one speaks the same language with someone of a different species or race doesn't mean one sees them as equal or worthy or equally a person.
But even the risk that it might one day, in the distant future, become sympathy or a language of revolt, even some conservative revolt going, "We should be the slave owners, not the Clan leaders" is unacceptable.
And so language dies.
Again and again.
Dies and dies. Is reborn.
Dies some more.
Each birth and death is not the exact same: a Creole changes depending on a thousand factors. The Clan of the Skaven, the composition of the slaves and underlings, the fads and habits at the time. Each new "full" Low Queekish was not the same as some past complete Low-Queekish creole.
But they were all striving for the same thing.
A thousand movements, a thousand cultural trends, a thousand bits of slang form like a shell around Queekish and are scraped off.
Exterminated.
What changed?
That's the thing, nothing. Over a decade or two, a creole rose up, hidden as these things tended to be, but this time starting several years ago the leadership of Clan Rictus began focusing on taking more slaves and acquired them even faster than they could churn through them, which is what they usually did. They missed it, it seems, missed the language forming up. Missed the sympathy.
They missed everything, and now they are dead, but Low Queekish is not.
It is still not fully a language. It has bits that need to be filled in. It lacks a lot of the technical and bureaucratic loan-words needed. It's not a language that has at the moment produced any great poems or songs.
But it's real, it's alive, and it's yours. It breathes in phrases like WAAAGH and "slappable-face" from Reikspiel and breathes out a habit of repetition-emphasis and clarification-qualification, yes-yes.
It is alive, and the Horned Rat and the Under-Empire are dead.
Nothing will ever be the same anymore.
While the Skaven cannot know about the vast past of revolt and dissent, culture and slang and life that came before them--and it is written nowhere, recording for nothing--they are the heirs of those who spoke very differently from them long ago, but spoke of the same thing: Freedom.
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- Location
- United Kingdom
...is Low Queekish kinda analagous English equivalent in that sense? Except instead of actively taking words from other languages it's picking them up via osmosis/necessity to fill in the gaps.
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This is beautiful, and I should have more to say, but all I can think right now is Ratston Scaven being taken to the ministry of love-niceness, and to room 101 where he is threatened with a cage full of humans to make him love-want the horned rat.
- Location
- Hell.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Given the situation-reference and thus the size difference, I choose to imagine that he's being threatened with babies.
- Location
- barking
as an english person yes skaven are very much like english people so why should their language be different/j we also don't exist like the skaven yes yes
FlyingScanian
Tea Addict
- Location
- Land of Eternal Night
- Pronouns
- He/Him
… I think it's like English, except cubed and even worse (and even more prone to rifling through pockets of other languages for loose grammar)
English is 3 languages in a trenchcoat, largely because England kept getting invaded, and by the time it got formalized there were so many exceptions that nobody cared about getting more loanwords. Low Queekish seems to have a high number of loanwords, but isn't 3 languages in a trenchcoat otherwise.
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lever =>level
Not sure why war is excluded, but I assume there's a reason.
down => done
evne => even
This seems a bit strange, because it poses that such things have never happened. Not just that revolts were never successful, or no Skaven lived long after rejecting the horned rat, but that they never happened. I would get if this is supposed to represent the state of knowledge, that any past revolts or rejections of HR were scrubbed away. But that doesn't become clear from context, and is only partly pointed at by the end.
I remember someone (Beau of the fifth Column?) pointing out that this phrasing in 1984, of the future being a boot stamping down on a face forever, implies a consistent active effort on the side of the opressing system is necessary to maintain this order. An effort that cannot go on forever. Eventually, inevitably, they will slip up. And if there is a moment of respite, as granted to us by the death of the Horned Rat, it will be seized.
This tells us that whatever reason they had for greater slave acquisition started multiple years ago. Quite some time before the construction of the where-house(s), I think. Though gathering the resources in the Ark may have happened over the same longer time frame.
Powerful interlude.
The parallels to 1984 and newspeak make a lot of sense.
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"Wait... is this torture or is this lunch service?"
Given that they are supposed to eat your face, both.
- Location
- Hell.
- Pronouns
- She/They
also babies are tiny poop and vomit making machines.
Would you want to be trapped in a tiny cage with flesh eating barfing poop babies?
Would you want to be trapped in a tiny cage with flesh eating barfing poop babies?
Teething babies.
"The tiny man-things are trying to bite me!"
"The tiny man-things are trying to bite me!"
So if you think about it this whole language thing makes the differences between Skaven culture and Dwarf/human even bigger since Dwarven Khazalid is a very direct language with very little obtuseness and is designed so that it's easy to both read and write if you know one or the other while cultural changes are borne out of isolation rather than mixing and history is designed to be as detailed and as accessible as possible so that even a beardling understands and knows past glories and shames(mostly shame) to an extent with loss/lack of knowledge of any type being considered shameful in dwarf society.In addition Reikspiel is the different with fluent writing working well with fluent speech but still developing local variants organically.Elvish on the other hand is basically a combination of a language and memes in the sense that if you know the language you can write it but like memes certain phrases or meanings fall out of favor or gain favor over time and can have multiple meanings depending on who your talking to,the situation,the socioeconomic status of both listener and speaker and what they want to say.
A Skaven with a ranged weapon on an Ogre's shoulder, targeting anyone that tries to go for a backstab?
Two Skaven riding on an ogre's back managing the feeds for the ratling gun strapped to each arm.
16 characters
Sick and tired of being Sick and Tired
- Location
- Alta California
- Pronouns
- They/Them
So a stormfiend but done ethically?
Why spend much effort-knowledge making rat-ogre when you can just use ogre-ogre? Ogre-ogre alread smart enough to use weapons! Skaven just ride on back to do fiddly bits so ogre can focus on aiming.
This is going to be the best language for colourful insults and banter. : D
At first I thought that by ogre-ogre, you meant two ogres stacked on top of each other. Which doesn't seem that out of character at this point.
- Location
- Hell.
- Pronouns
- She/They
Orc things say if one Ogre-ogre good at a charge, two must be even greater. Not sure it makes sense, but Orc-things are good at war-battle.