Zog
-the invisable omelette that lives in the toilet's
Guide to learning Esplati
What is Esplati?
Esplati is the national language of the Esplatians, a group of people with bright blue hair who live in the folds of the fabric of time between the era of the Romans and the Spaniards. Their national dish is supernoodles and toffee popcorn, their national anthem is "the conga by Black lace" (which occured through a puzzling and mysterious encounter with the black bearded ostrich of KuataJuglier) and their most notable deity is Jeff the god of biscuits.
How do I learn Esplati?
The best way of course, of learning any language is to mingle with the locals, but unfortunately TTV's (Time Tranversing Vehicles) do not come onto the mass market until AD 3104 and so any earthlings wishing to learn the language before this time period will of course either have to fall through a hole (a very rare and haphazard method of tranversing time - you may fall out the other end in the World Of Wicker - not to be confused with a 20th Century garden furniture store, this world is highly evil *shudder* and to be avoided at all costs, the best analogy of this world would be compare it to the biblical "hell". And so falling through the holes in the fabric of time is not advisable.) or learn it the old fashioned way through hard graft. (Unless of course you can get hold of a memory implant of course! LOL! But again, only available for the mass market after 2876 and even then, only for the very rich.)
Go on then, I am a primitive earthling living before TTVs and memory implants
Unfortunately learning Esplati is a very complicated process. Forget about declensions and conjugations and tenses and everything you may or may not know about learning languages. Esplati is a very personal language, its range and context are purely up to the individual.
The basic concept of Esplati is that it is a language made up of Latin and Spanish. (As the Esplatians live inbetween these two places that is quite self-explanitory). What you know in latin, you say in latin, what you know in spanish, you say in spanish. And what you don't know in either of these two languages, you don't say at all.
Hence you can already see the problem arising. What happens when somebody knows yay amount of latin and spanish but somebody else knows a completely different amount? Can they still converse?
Well, the answer is yes of course, the Esplatians are very resourceful people and alongside their primitive age of making the wheel and fire, they also invented the universal translator - admittedly at first when purely made out of rocks, it didn't work very well but then neither did fire. But soon, they learnt to make fire out of wood and universal translators out of silicon and everything went swimmingly.
I don't have a universal translator - can I still converse with them?
You will still beable to talk to them, and they will understand you. However unless you are fluent in both the languages of Spanish and Latin and able to interchange easily between the two, you will not be able to understand what they say. There is a very ancient and wise saying that may be some help in this situation for anybody worried about not being able to understand the Esplatians. It goes like this; "tough".
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