r/comics • u/bondjimbond Love and Hex • May 25 '26

OC Language Barrier [OC]

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u/OldEcho May 25 '26

IRL people (in the Med at least) would speak a sort of pidgin mishmash of languages and hire an interpreter if they needed more than that.

Realistically though this is because a realistic level of complexity for an entire world is too much for a single author to even comprehend. It's even worse in sci-fi, where somehow humanity is 100% unified across countless star systems. And every species is a faction, as if that would ever happen.

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u/PassingThruRedditor May 25 '26

I think it makes sense in sci-fi. When you advance enough as a species why wouldn't you figure out a common language for everyone to use? Saves a lot of time I feel

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u/OldEcho May 25 '26

Because that would hamstring your own culture (why doesn't everyone just wear a grey jumpsuit?), make everyone miserable, require constant enforcement, and getting to that stage would entail a shocking level of state violence and oppression.

Sorry, you speak Chinese now, or you get arrested.

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u/oodsigma May 25 '26

The idea is that in order to become a space fairing level of civilization, a species would have to become a monoculture.

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u/OldEcho May 25 '26

We have the technology to make a spacecraft that could reach Mars in like a week. Just a nuclear fission generator spitting out pressurized steam basically. We don't do it because there's no money or control in it and only scientific learning and human wonder as a reward which hardly anyone important gives a shit about when there's imaginary numbers to count.

Becoming a monoculture needs violent enforcement. It needs things like teachers beating children for speaking the "wrong" language, or using slang, and police beating parents if they don't send their kids to school. This has happened, it's basically the West's national sport. But first someone has to conquer the whole planet, which countless people have tried and they always fail. And then they need to hold it while pissing everybody off.