Yeah, clearly not dead.

They were arrogant and self-righteous, but they didn't think of clones as meat-droids, little better than slaves, only useful to be thrown to their deaths by the millions as Traviss depicts them. Every Jedi-Clone interaction outside of the Travissty novels depicts exactly the opposite: The Jedi are the ones pushing the clones to be more individualistic and telling them they matter, the Jedi are the ones telling them that their lives are worth saving, the clones themselves are the ones who by-and-large see themselves as nothing but biological droids whose only purpose is to die for the Republic, the Jedi weren't the vanguard of the Republic aristocracy who care not for the peasantry that Traviss likes to depict. Karen Traviss wanted to write a story about unrecognized heroes being stepped on by their oppressive government and be damned whether it made sense within the setting, this is why her Star Wars and Gears of War novels are virtually identical from a readers perspective. No, if you read it again, I clearly disclaim the piece as being my own. It was written by a female acquaintance of mine.

But it's not, it's not even a cipher. There is no reason to refer to it as a language.

Yet we never hear Jango speak a word of it even when he should be alone with his sone. You are. If you're defending Karen Traviss and her works or Mando'a, you are a Traviss Fanboy, because there's no rational reason to defend her. Explicitly contradicted by every other example of a Mandalorian ever. This literally only appears in Travissty's works. Canderous wasn't speaking Mando'a to his troops on Dxun, Jango never talked it to Boba, we never hear of it in the pre-Traviss Mandalorian depictions. Hell we don't even see it in most of the post-Traviss depictions like in The clone Wars where one would expect to see Death Watch using Mando'a exclusively. Except the Rasol'nare is ********.

They can do bad things, they just stop being good guys.

Why is using special effects rendered to extrapolate data wrong? He is affiliated with Lucasfilms, as soon as LFL licenses and hires him to write the book he becomes affiliated. Except we do. In 'Pegasus' Riker states it would take the Galaxy-class E-D's entire photon torpedo payload to destroy a 5km asteroid, which works out to between 25 Megatons total if it's hard granite and 600MT if it's nickel-iron, which works out to a photon torpedo being between 1kT and 3MT. This coincides with 'Relics' in which the E-D is pulled in close to a class-G star with less than 45% the luminosity of Sol (given there is water and vegetation inside the Dyson Sphere), at 150,000km from the surface of the star the power intensity would be 25-30MW/m^2. At 610m long and 130m tall the surface area (if it were a solid rectangle) would be 78,000m^2, the shield being an ellipsoid bubble would bump this up to 100,000m^2. Multiply 1E5m^2 by 30MW/m^2 works out to 3TW. At about 25% strength the shields were able to withstand this barrage for about three hours, which would give us a total shield strength of 325000MJ, a little under 31MT. Which would put the average Trek shield able to take about ten of their own photorps, which is about what we see in the show.

No you're not, since that's quite clearly against the Jedi Code. This is like trying to say you're a vegan, but you love your nightly Big Mac.

Well that's not true either, the Spartans had a huge slave underclass to focus on agrarian things whilst the free citizens focused on war matters.. So you freely admit to not caring about quality and you think it's okay for authors to be lazy? It's quite clear that she's trying to emulate the likes of Tolkien and Marc Okrand but isn't willing to put the effort into making a working sensible language for them. It's pure laziness as there's plenty of people willing to do linguistics work and fabricate an alien language, we see it all the time. Oh and by the way, the criticism of Mando'a was written by a lady.

Name one society where the warriors are also farmers. If you say Sparta I will laugh my *** off. And the Jedi were able to manufacture a tomb for Freedon Nadd out of it, it wasn't some super secret only Mandos could do.

A lot of it's in Dark Empire, Dark Empire II, and Empire's End.

And? So? Therefore? Irrelevant. That's what Suspension of Disbelief is. Show me where I'm making stuff up.

No he doesn't. The Empire Strikes Back novelization explicitly says so.

For Sith Pick an appropriately violent or sinister name for a Sith, find a Dutch translator (Vader is Dutch for Father), plug in your word and see if it comes up with something apropros. For example Moord is Murder.

I'm sorry that you can't make a cogent argument, it's not my fault you have to make up blatant ad hominem attacks because you can't validate your own opinion.

Complete Cross Section, p.63, Republic Assault Ship main reactor peak output 2x10^23watts 10^23=100000000000000000000000 or 100 sextillion, multiply by 2 to get 200 sextillion 1 GW=1000000000 or 1 billion Watts 200 sextillion/1billion=200000000000000 or 200 trillion Gigawatts. Even if you were right, and I'm not seeing an episode named or a quotation given to validate what you're saying, Star Wars generates three orders of magnitude higher energy output. A Venator has vastly greater power than that and an ISD still even more. You're wrong. Star Wars canon is anything not explicitly and irreconcilably contradicted by higher canon is canon. No, only explicit things. Give precedence, for example when someone in the EU says the Executor is only 12km long that's explicitly contradicted by the scaling of the mile-long ISDs around it. You are wrong.

That's exactly what it is. For example: How do we reconcile 'Super Star Destroyer' with Executor-class Star Dreadnaught'? 'Super Star Destroyer' is a Rebel colloquialism used for any Imperial ship larger than an Imperator/Imperial-class Star Destroyer. There are exceptions, but they were purposefully made to be non-canon. Anything labeled Infinities is non-canon. That's exactly what it is. For example: How do we reconcile 'Super Star Destroyer' with Executor-class Star Dreadnaught'? 'Super Star Destroyer' is a Rebel colloquialism used for any Imperial ship larger than an Imperator/Imperial-class Star Destroyer. There are exceptions, but they were purposefully made to be non-canon. Anything labeled Infinities is non-canon. This is explicitly contradicted by G-canon. You can not be a good guy and use the Dark side. I know it's fun to inject some moral ambiguity to fiction nowadays, but Star Wars is very much reminiscent of High Fantasy by being very much a battle between good and evil. The Lightside and Darkside are not merely tools.

Disregard.

So you're accusing Dr Curtis Saxton of making up the numbers? In point of dact, before Dr Saxton put out the numbers in the ICS series Wars' calculations still stomped Trek but were far more conservative. All of his calculations are free to find online, you're welcome to disprove them if you can. Rather than whine like a butthurt baby, because your favorite fictional series would get roflstomped by mine. You don't see me whining because the Iain M. Banks' The Culture would dance all over Star Wars like the hottest nightclub dance floor in LA.

That's not how that works. Acceleration in a zero-g environment is thrust/weight. The Venator is putting out three thousand times it's own weight in thrust versus the Galaxy which only puts out a thousand times it's own weight, following the square cube law the Venator is generating vastly more thrust than a Galaxy could imagine. This isn't even up for argument, that's exactly what happened. I would think as a gamer you'd understand game balance does not always sync up with what we get. For example in TOR the Sith Warrior and the Jedi Knight are the prodigal sons of both their factions by the end of their story, but for gameplay purposes they're still balanced against the other classes, if this were simply a novel they would run rampant over everybody else. Likewise if an Imperator actually worked like we see elsewhere, the squadrons you're a part of in the X-Wing would have to be made up of Nebula-class Frigates and not X-Wings. Well that's not true either. Star Wars 'lasers' act nothing like lasers. Secondly that's a no-limits fallacy. And thirdly, you might want to explain why borg cutting 'lasers' are a threat to Federation ships then. We're discussing TOS/TNG/Voy/DS9 canon not the reboot canon. The whole red matter crap doesn't exist outside of it, and we have no idea how quickly they can produce it. They must have some ****** training because I remember a 5ft-nothing 100-ish pound woman beating Klingon *** in hand-to-hand combat in DS9. Though, it shouldn't be too surprising since every single time we see the Klingons fighting a war on the ground the sum total of their tactical brilliance is a mass charge over open ground with bat'leths drawn. Klingon resistance isn't that great. Again, noting that Kira can take down multiple Klingons in short order with her bare hands and nothing she did was ever too exceptional. Meanwhile on the other side we have Stormtroopers with blasters that blow meter wide chunks out of concrete, Imperial Guard with weaponize force pikes that on stun can drop a full grown Wookiee in half a second and on kill can sunder starship bulkheads or pulp an organic being simply with a touch (and incidentally has far better reach than a bat'leth), and both have armor that laughs off a bat'leth blade with ease. Then there's the question of how the Klingons can get the shields down to transport in the first place. I've already demonstrated that you could set a single Acclamator up against a million standard Trek ships and it will just laugh as the phasers and photorps are deflected with ease. Not even. Star Trek has humans cross-breeding with aliens, gravity in a starship that doesn't rotate, and faster-than-light travel according to science takes infinite energy so that's right out. Don't kid yourself, Star Trek is no more realistic that Star Wars, they just hide it behind meaningless technobabble.

Except she didn't. She made up an entirely different order of Jedi. The Jedi in her books are nothing like the actual Jedi.

It's a word inasmuch as a Norinco Hunter is an Assault Weapon.

Imperial ships do not require calculating a jump to go to do a hyperspace jump, they're only necessary because hyperdrives are so fast that even a minute in hyperdrive and you risk slamming into a planet or star. That's funny, Star Wars: Complete Cross Sections clocks a Venator at 3000Gs of acceleration where The Next Generation Technical Manual puts the Enterprise-D at a mere 1000G. Is your argument that the Klingon's have impulse drives that are over three times more efficient than the Federation? Those aren't shield generators, the shield were down before the communication globes were blown up. They were blown up to demonstrate that 'yes the shields are down' rather than just show you a random Imperial officer telling you so. Additionally Star Wars weapons are vastly beyond Trek-tech. The main phaser array on a Galaxy-class like the Enterprise-D is a 3.6 gigawatt weapon, the light guns on one of the twenty year old Acclamators are 300 million gigawatts. An Acclamator's shields dissipate 70 trillion gigawatts and the medium turbolasers on the Acclamator are 838.6 trillion GW weapons. Debunked. Your analysis is wrong.

Because he doesn't want to be outted as a Sith Lord, secrecy served the Sith Order for 2000 years and finally helped them accomplish their three primary goals: #1 Ruling the Galaxy, #2 Wiping out the Jedi, #3 Destroying the Republic; why would he give that advantage up? Secondly the Force Storm took about a day to destroy a whole planet and we don't know if it worked through planetary shields which most important worlds like Bothawuii, Alderaan, and Coruscant havel the Death Star was designed to blast right through the shield and pop a planet like a hand grenade. Because it allows him to root out traitors and those who are truly loyal. It's a convenient ploy.

It's not a language. This is from a linguist I know on another board: A DISSECTION OF MANDALORIAN by this person Mistake One of Mando'a: the consonant phonology of mandalorian appears to be as follows m n ŋ [ng] p, b t, d k [k, c], g f [vh]?, v s, ʃ [c, sh] w, j [y] l, r tʃ [ch, c], dʒ [j] Does this look familiar to you? It's english, minus th [path], dh [paths], z and zh (zh being a marginal sound in english anyway, found only in things like 'vision' and foreign loans) Where are the implosives? Why does it have both an s and an sh? Why can't ng be an inital noise? Why does it have a voiced affricate dzh but no z or zh? Why is there no fricative version of k or g? No clicks? why not other affricates besides the two found in english? What about noble kx, or pf, or gb, or kp, or ts and dz? How about some prenasalised plosives? Palatal plosives, my absolute favorite of noises the human mouth can produce? Hell, how about palatals or retroflex noises at all? It doesn't need to have all of these things, but having it be the exact same as english spelt funny without the letters th and z is hardly good. Further, Ms. Traviss does not specify what her notations mean, except in horrible phonetic spelling like ROOS-ahl-or for ruus'alor. This makes it vaguely impossible for me to tell if how many vowels there are, but I guarantee it's about the same as an anglophone's imagined "Generic Foreign" vowels. There appear to be all 5 long english vowels, and at least 3 (a, u, and i) appear to have long forms based on doubled spelling, yet since there's no phonetic notation I cannot tell at all. The 'ROOS-ahl-or' style is insufficient, as based on that I'd imagine it to be spelt ruusaalor. Why not some umlaut, or distinction based on nasalisation, or vowel harmony or somesuch? It could be justifiable if it were better described (perhaps the a, u, and i long vowels are remnants from a time when it had long and short a/i/u, but short i and short u in certain situations lowered to become o and e, thus explaining why there is no long e and o?), but that is not done. Further, see Phonotactics later for why even such an explanation fails hard. Similar issues plague consonants. What is the letter R, praytell? Is it the rare-among-the-entire-planet english R? The spanish tap? Spanish trill? German uvular, trilled or not? What about japanese lateral r (although the japanese also use a tap)? All of these sounds are entirely different in articulation, their perception as similar is something of a cognitive mystery. Is L velarised or clear? T and D- are they apical or laminar? dental or dental-alveolar? Can they be flapped intervocalically? Incidentally what about tone? The vast majority of human languages have at least 2 tones, yet Mando'a doesn't? It doesn't need to, but it's just another notch in 'Is anglocentric'. The biggest issue, however, is the spelling. Traviss carelessly spells /k/ as both k and c, something unprecedented and unheard of outside of the roman republic and its descendants, for no apparant rhyme or reason, not realising that english is one of the few languages to be so strange. She uses an apostrophe in random words for absolutely no detectable reason. Let me digress for a minute to make a public service announcement to every Fantasy Writer and Sci-Fi Author since the dawn of time. There are five acceptable times to use apostrophes in a language transcription. 1) To mark glottal stops. Consider using a dedicated character such as h or x instead. 2) To seperate collisions that would cause dipthongs, like hothouse into hot'house. Consider hyphens instead, or ignore it. For vowels, consider diaresis. 3) To mark palatalisation or similar things, if you are creating a russian-inspired orthography. Consider not making a russian language that way, perhaps marking it by silent vowels or alternate vowel transcriptions like irish does for its slender consonants. 4) To mark ejectivisation, implosiveness (via 'b, 'd, etc), or other exotic consonants save clicks. Congrats, this is a worthwhile reason, although consider if unicode or a custom font allows you to make it a ligature with the letter to better prevent it looking like stupid fantasy apostrophies. When possible, find a new way, like bb or hb or whatnot for implosive b. Apostrophes are not a good thing. 5) Because you are an idiot and think it makes a language look exotic. Reconsider everything about your life. Now, back to spelling strangeness. Traviss does not stop at merely using c and k for words, which could be salvaged by claiming c represents, say, /tʃ/ or /c/ or /k/ while k represents /k'/ /k/ or /q/ or somesuch. She also uses it to spell sh, in situations like b'aalec (pronounced ba:liʃ as far as I know, based on her transcription of bah-LEESH). This is entirely silly, as it is used initially in words like ca'tra to mean /k/ (KAH-tra) and even /s/ in words like cinarin (see-NAH-rin), meaning that Ms Travis has intentionally or not duplicated a spelling artifact that results from vulgar latin in terms of soft vs hard c. Consistancy could still be salvaged, but she does not in fact follow through and also make g soften to another noise in front of front vowels like she does for c, presumably because english does not (we changed all our soft gs like the one in 'gaol' into j[ail]). Further, she uses y and i interchangeably, a spelling artifact that goes back to the merger of /y(: )/ and /i(: )/ back in classical latin and was thus duplicated in french and thus english. This is a pet peeve of mine, it's like using 'x' for 'cs' or 'qu' for 'kw'. There is no conceivable reason for this except: 1) The language is a descendant of latin, or closely influenced by latin or its descendants. (Romance Languages, English) OR 2) The language was romanised by english speakers who were not linguists or even competant but instead were extremely dull missionaries. (Some foreign languages, but not many) If you simply search and replaced ' with a null, and fixed the spelling, Mando'a would still be complete ****, but would at least not offend the entire universe merely by existing. Finally, as an afternote, Stress. This one is marginal but it bugs me: Mando'a has unpredictable stress on words, as shown by the few examples I cited above. Some languages do have irregular stress, it is true. However, it's merely another "English doesn't have regular stress, so Traviss did not even think of putting regular stress in because it never occured to her." Further, if the stress is irregular, why not mark the vowels with an acute accent or other mark for stress? Orthographies are meant to be readable and sensible, not poor imitations of the already somewhat dilapidated system english uses. PHONOTACTICS: There are none. For those of you who don't know, Phonotactics is why the word Firk doesn't exist in english but could, yet Dlakŗtsvi can't, despite the fact that one can easily say either if you try. (try pronouncing ŗ like the supposed "ir" in the word skirt and you'll realise english actually has 4 "vowels" you've never even realised existed: Skirt, Pull, Adam, Eden). Phonotactics governs what sounds are allowed in english, like how 'str-' can be a starting consonant cluster, but zd- can't. Mando'a does not appear to have any constraints other than what english would allow. It has few consonant clusters, but they include 'str-', 'tr-', '-rg-', '-tn-', -n'b- (!), -shg-, etc. There appears to be no practical limits on what consonants can appear together in a word, and initially the rule appears to be 'if english can do it, so can mando'a'. For an example why this matters, imagine japanese if you deleted all the letter u. Further, words in hebrew can be things such as bkat or bnei. Finally, Hawaiian can't have any consonant clusters at all. This gives flavour to a language, especially in what ones it allows or disallows. For an example, see Tolkien's adaptation of finnish phonotactics to give his elven language a light sound, allowing voiced consonants only after a homorganic nasal stop [-nd-, -mb- were allowed, but b and d could not occur anywhere else.] ALLOPHONIC DISTINCTION Dialectical variation and allophonic distinction are given a cursory nod by Traviss, ironically to make her language even more englishlike. Leaving aside that an unaspirated h is rather impossible, Traviss makes a rather bizarre move, saying that h was silent beforehand and now is pronounced. If so, where did it come from? Sounds don't spring up from nowhere. Hypercorrection can't occur across the entire language, and a restorative sound change using a near-silent archiphoneme like a vowel-initial glottal stop is almost unprecedented. I at least have never heard of a silent letter being restored. Further, more generic foreignism: J used to be /j/, like it should (English is the only language, based on the corrosive influence of french, to misuse this consonant), but now is /dzh/? This one is at least plausible, it is in fact how the old french j (which later lost the intial d- in the cluster) arose from softened g. However, it's just... generic. Generic Foreignism: Spanish b-v distinction loss, and Latinate/Germanate (in opposite directions) v-w distinction loss. Further, is d archaic or not? She has d all over her words, and indicates it is pronounced as a 'd' in the pronunciations, but also has T all over the place. Is the archaic pronunciation swapping d and t? That's impossibly stupid, for numerous reasons. Further, the lack of distinction indicates to me that either d or t or both are often flapped, meaning it's another englishism. (Example of flapping: Say itty bitty city. Now say iddy biddy ciddy. If you are flapping d and t, they will not be distinguishable. Now, for an added bonus. Say that sound with nothing in front, but something after it, say- ttina, or ddina. Keep trying if you can't do it at first, saying 'itty' or 'city' while paying attention to how your tongue moves. Notice what happened when you did? Suddenly it became the letter r. An alveolar flap is yet another rhotic sound used as r in some languages (including some varieties of japanese!) and yet english considers it a -tt- or -dd-. Rotokas considers it a d or r, the two are the same to them. Et cetera.) Further, no X is hardly a thing to pride yourself on. There is no concievable reason any conlang should ever use the letter x for /ks/ unless it is a fictional descendent of Vulgar Latin. Ever. Using x for other purposes (/sh/, as in old spanish), /?/ as in piraha, etc. is acceptable if you're willing to put up with it making you look stupid. On the plus side, the letters qu are entirely absent from Mando'a, which is like saying "He tripped over his own feet, but on the plus side he hasn't vomited on the floor yet". QU is another latin artefact via french in english, and CW or KW, depending upon your choice of k spelling, is entirely correct and proper. Although don't use kw- in a conlang without good reason. Example: In a language I have made kw- is just one of several *****l versions of consonants (pw, tw, bw, dw, gw, lw, rw, hw, and in some dialects sw and zw round out the mix, as -w based consonants are considered a basic consonant up there with generic p, t, k). It's concievably acceptable to make a language where the only *****lised consonant is kw, but I tend to err on the side of not making a language too much englishlike without extremely good reasons. You'll note we're 9 million words in to this epic failpoem and I haven't even gotten to grammar yet. Luckily, we're almost there. The Apertif is getting done, so we can move on the main course soon... as in now. Let's go. Put on your hazard gear for this. I will admit I'm impressed that Traviss knows what a case is considering how English-biased her language is, but I'm pretty sure she knows some German so it's not like it's a godlike achievement or something, like if she actually knew what phonotactics were. Now, don't get me wrong. Some languages are very regular and simple. Chinese as far as I know has no irregularities. Turkish has one (To Be, of course). Many languages have no case. Languages that the average english speaker would call "Simple" (Analytic languages) are quite common [Turkish isn't one, but Chinese is]. But it's still lazy and anglocentric to do so. If this language were designed competantly, I'd almost guess it were meant to be a language for lazy english speaking nerds to read and learn. It seems to pander to the idea of 'like English but simpler and more regular, with kewl space words spoken by Space Gurkhas'. Let me briefly explain types of languages to you: The first form I will explain is the Synthetic Fusional Language. In this language, a single ending (often very compact) will tell you multiple things on a word. For example, in Latin, -as means 'plural accusative-case', and the verb ending -verimus means 'we will have been [verb]ing' (Future-Pluperfect Indicative Active 1st Person Plural). That is a lot of information to carry in a 3 syllable word, no? The upside of synthetic fusion is that a language has practically free word order. If I know that '-us' means 'Singular Subject' and '-as' means 'Plural Object', there's no way to confuse the following sentence: Gallus Cenas Consumpsit. (The frenchman ate the dinners). There's also no way to confuse the following: Consumpsit Gallus Cenas. Cenas Consumpsit Gallus. Gallus Consumpsit Cenas. Since the subject is still tagged, and the object still tagged, word order is basically free for simple sentences and even more complex ones. The downside of synthetic fusion is that a language has a ******** of grammar to memorize. Each ending for each type of noun and verb and verb tense and so forth must be memorized. Latin has at least 48 verb endings I can think of at the moment, and 50 noun endings, plus irregular verbs and nouns. That sounds like it really sucks, what else is there? Well, there's analytic languages. Plus: No grammar tables to memorize. Everything is pretty intuitive for an english speaker, because english is rather analytic. Example: "I now eat those many egg" (I'm eating the eggs). Downside- word order is now fixed. "Now those many egg eat I" no longer means the same thing. Word order and when to place certain things, and how to form now complex verb ideas like "I will have not been able to have done that" (merely "id nonpotuero facere" in Latin, which is 3 words vs 10). These things can become just as complex as synthetic languages, just in different ways. Often, things will fuse on the end of words. Like, Many- might become a prefix meaning 'plural'. So Manyegg, Manydog, Manyman, etc. Further, verbs could get things like "Now-Eat-I" or "Eat-I-Now". This is known as Synthetic Agglutinative. Upside: Word order is now looser, especially if you get things like Manyeggob (object), Isub (subject) as english examples. Downside: things like "Eat-I-Now-It" are much longer words than before, although there's now less words in a sentence. Finally, if agglutinating gets crazy and multiple concepts start fusing into single words, things can become polyagglutinative. Many amerind languages such as Inuit have entire sentences expressed as a single word based on agglutinating particles that now include roots/stems of words, at the cost of the sentence being huge. Languages can also have less pure status than just 1 of the 4 types- German has agglutinating nouns but a fusional noun case system, and "complex" (synthetic) verbs. English has relics of its fusional case-using past, like verb endings and the difference between Me and I, but it also is largely analytic in structure. Why did I just turn into linguistics instead of Mando'a? Because time and time again, Traviss takes the easy way out. It's just "Analytic with a few fusional elements". English, but simpler. There's an entire world out there, and she's stuck on a gloomy island in the north atlantic. No offense to Brits, but your language isn't the crown jewel of the entire world. Maybe a conlang should explore new waters. I'd rant about things that could have been done differently, like a semitic root system, or a latin-like noun case declension system, or making it polysynthetic, but it'd just be long and griping. Let's just move forward with this trainwreck. -Vr, then. Haven't ever seen r used as a verb infinitive suffix. Traviss is bull********. She KNOWS there is no basis for her abuse of the letter '. "It can mean just about anything" in a spelling system means "It means nothing". Spelling is systematic, and marking breathing is hardly intelligent outside of the realm of speech pathology. Further, she never explains how it marks pronunciation shifts (palatalisation? ejectivisation? what?), meaning even she doesn't know. Dropping the copula is at least not in english (much, save in some dialects). I can't complain. Also, '-tion', although it looks much too like 'question' and thus sets off my '[un]conscious english cribbing' alarm (nothing is as embarassing as that happening to a language), it at least is pronounced 'ti-on' and not 'shn' like english does due to vulgar latin hijinx. Infinitive Imperative is rather spanishy, but I can't complain either. This is actually not too bad of a session, which is a rope-a-dope for the next one that will punch you in the cut. Hi I'm this idea and I didn't work in Esperanto, please euthanise me. Also, 'pronunciation is a factor in how the language sounds when spoken'? No ****. Give me some pronunciation info, then, unless you think mandalorian is pronounced with accents ranging from japanese to aussie to canadian to nigerian and that the dropping of letters changes depending upon whether said mandalorians speak which of those languages natively. Okay, the use of 'don't carry' for 'put down' is rather good. It reminds me of latin, how you will form negative commands by "Cease to X!". However, this does not excuse the complete boringness of these particles. Yeah, it's analytic. I get it. **** that ****. Your language should not be boring me to death, even if it is analytic. Here's a brilliant idea- make some particles called evidentiality particles. I stole this **** from Quetchua and it makes any language 200x more awesome instantly. Have sounds tagged on the end of verbs or as analytic particles or as a factor in fusional endings, depending upon how you want it, which indicate things like "Hearsay", "Probably", "Sure", "Proven Fact", "Untrue", etc. Hunter-gatherer cultures often develop these because it's useful to say like "There might be a tiger in that bush, stay still" or "There's probably going to be food at the tree" or "I heard that there was a huge noise last night, what do you think it was?". That's just one example of a way you can change a language to make it still analytic but more interesting. Instead of saying "I hear existed loud noise yesterday possessive night, what think it was?", say "Existed loud noise yesterday possessive night hearsay, what think it was opinion?". Further, note how englishlike the grammar is, within the limits traviss is allowed by her own structure (such as an imperative prefix) she makes it entirely englishlike with SVO grammar and similar. There's nothing per se wrong with SVO itself, it's tied for most-common-word-order, but it's like murder evidence piling up. The alibi is looking a little thin, if one even existed. I also guarantee that adjectives come first in Mando'a, despite a vast majority of SVO languages using noun-adjective form. Germanic Languages and French are actually exceptions to the rule, which is really galling because it means the only deviation from the generic she has is to make it unintentionally more englishlike. A few seconds on google if you know where to look can get you resources on whether adverbs come first or last, whether the direct article is before or after a noun, et cetera, including statistical percentages based on linguists' observations. Aaand here's the gutpunch. can't disapprove, although I think colloquially -jag and -dal would dominate since -yc is completely useless from an optimality theory point of view and just from a practical one. This is also implied by analytic, like the lack of gender, so I'm not too concerned, although I still think it's lazy to make an analytic language without any cool features to back its simple grammar up. WHAAAT. You cannot exist without a past and/or future tense. Arguably the future is a luxury, many languages do without (Japanese, for instance), but the past-present distinction is vital. Or at minimum, having a past-present and a future tense to distinguish now from later. How do the Mandalorians not use measurements of time? I was originally going to shrug this off with 'oh, they must use analytic words like 'now' and 'later' like my "I now eat many egg", but then I realised, 'ru' and 'ven' are those words. Ven for instance is a root found in words meaning meaning 'future'. It's mad. I might believe it if I were told of an example people who don't use time distinctions at all (the Pirahã, perhaps, I'd not put anything past them), but it seems implausible enough that it sets off my alarms. Further, in a primitive hunter-gatherer society, perhaps you don't need time measurement, but how do the Mandalorians manage to do anything in modern civilisation without times? They can't make it clear from context, especially since Traviss doesn't state this when usually she would love to say "context will tell". Here Traviss confuses the passive form of a verb ('the lamp was broken' is passive, focusing on the lamp compared to 'something broke the lamp' which focuses on the person or event which is only implied in the passive sentence) with the participle ('broken'). Just because in english they look the same doesn't mean they are the same, and further, making passives work via 'copula participle' like I think she intends is very, very english-romance. Why not a word that flips a verb to passive from active? How about a word that deletes the subject by taking its part as a null word, so that 'Null broke lamp' serves as 'the lamp was broken?'. How about actually making verbs slightly not analytic, and making them alter somehow for passives. They could, say, add a suffix, or change the pronunciation of the end in a regular way like, say, tat to tad. (which would be hard since that would require Traviss have not ended any active verbs in voiced consonants, for instance, so it's too late now unless she wants to revise her 1186 word dictionary. The first sentence is rather good- a difference between a more emphatic and less emphatic article is at least not obviously englishlike, although translating haar as 'this/those' and te as 'the' makes it less exotic. The plural information is useless. Regularity is again okay, if a bit stale (how do the Mandalorians keep their language that pure and regular? Turkish is an anomaly, and Chinese doesn't use endings. Endings are volatile things, they often change based on how they're attached which causes irregularities (like engilsh -z, in dogs (dogz) vs s in cat(s) vs oz in heroes (hiroz), although that one is at least regular. See latin for some irregularities in pluralisation, or technically singularisation, in Declension 3). Further, the pronunciation info is just taunting us. "Always pronounced 'ay'" (which I assume is english 'ay' (ei) and not 'rest of the world ay' (ai, since i=y/j). What else could it be? What other e sound is there in mando'a? My guess is she's trying to distinguish e from ε, both of whicha re in english. Play is ple in phonetic notation, and Pet is pεt. Ay also accidentally implies dipthongisation (ei, which is different from e, although largely equivalent to e: [despite what you're told, english doesn't have length distinction, e: = e in english. Our 'short' vowels are actually different entirely, and have been since their long counterparts moved in 1300, our terminology just didn't update]), but this further just nails in 'english language', since that's exactly how you'd pronounce a terminal e in english too. Fun fact; Mando'a has possessives that are the same as its pronouns. No, there's no 'of' equivalent. You just say 'you chair' for your chair. This is simplistic almost to pidgin levels, making me wonder if Mando'a would make more sense as a language that had shattered post-conquering by the New Republic and was a trade tongue pigin like Unserdeutsch or Tok Pisin. Example Tok Pisin sentence: "Dat man hi bi goodpela bi tru" (He was a good fellow/person, this statement is true). Pidgins are highly analytic, simplistic in grammar, and based on the phonology of the conqueror (thus why mando'a sounds like english). This is the only conceivable explanation for all of the facts about Mando'a and yet it still doesn't work, as it has almost no basic/english words in it. 'depending upon which makes pronunciation easier' is not a rule of grammar. At minimum, jesus, make a rule, like 'yc after consonants, la after vowels', so that it's grammar. That's not a *********** language. Adverbs and Adjectives being the same makes me leery, as adjectives should ideally have more ties with nouns than with 'generic descriptor phrase'. After all, many languages use them the same (we talk of 'the rich' and 'the wealthy' in english.) Then again, it's not inconcievable, especially since Mando'a has such a strict word order and is english structured so it's always Adjective-S Subject Adverb Verb Adjective-O Object. finally, back to pronunciation, to bring us full circle The stress on syllables shown in the lexicon is as commonly spoken, but many Mandalorians place stress on different syllables. How is this not obvious from reading it? Is it because english doesn't have uy in it so they're confused? I notice that 'ay' in Mando'a does in fact mean e as I suspected, except in one word where it's transcribed as ay (real ay) for no reason I know of. Gaa'tayl is /ga'tajl/, but Gaa'taylir is /ga'telir/. I have no clue why. Oh hey, there's another place for apostrophe. Two of them- contractions of prefixes and suffixes [Traviss does not realise you can't contract a word in the middle, it has to be at a boundary where two words intersect or else it's not a contraction] (l'ordeurves), and in phonetic transcription for representing stress Again, how is this not obvious. Also, why does U get attention, but no other vowel explanations like when it is ε and when it is e. No. I refuse to even talk about this. **** you. I'm done, this page is over. I'm not going to get into vocabulary. This is not how you make poetry or song. Yes, sometimes poets and songwriters cheat a little, but it's not supposed to be a rule. In conclusion, gosh darn it all. Somewhere across the Atlantic, the reincarnated spirit of J. R. R. Tolkien pulls the trigger, crying, and does not know why.

You forget how technologically advanced Star Wars is. You're talking about a society that has sufficiently advanced technology as to be virtually magical. Leia even says in one of the novels when Han is 50 that if he starts taking care of himself he can expect to live to be 120 before he starts developing medical issues from his old age, this makes 120yo the equivalent of 60-70 for humans. At seventy years old Han would still be about as healthy and capable as any of us are, were, or will be at thirty-five. As for Karen Traviss' novels I would recommend Hard Contact to young readers, around ten or so. It's not well written, but it's not bad, and the prose is simplistic and repetitive. After Hard Contact I can't recommend any of her books, since as the editors give her more freedom her soap-box ******** gets worse and worse until they ultimately wind up with one of her mouthpiece Jedi jumping in front of a padawan's lightsaber meant for a clone who was trying to kill the padawan and his friends in Order 66 to protect the clone. No it's stupid and as moronic as it sounds. What happened was Karen Traviss was contracted to write Star Wars novels for the Republic commando series where she did some detailing of the Mandalorians (really stupid detailing), she then went on to retcon a number of other authors' materials in her works, then when The Clone Wars came out they represented the Mandalorians as three different factions rather than two and had the homeworld be a desert instead of a forest-world. Karen Traviss threw a fit that anyone would dare retcon her work like a true hypocrite. She also had a penchant for referring to fans that didn't like her work as terrorists and fans of the Jedi as neo-nazis. I'm not even joking, this is taken literally from her blog: 'I'm sure you think you're a nice decent person who's kind to animals, recycles faithfully, and fills in tax returns honestly. Maybe you believe in God, too. But to me, you're someone who harbours a vile and degrading belief in the concept of Untermensch - the idea that some humans aren't human at all, and we can do as we like with them, for whatever arbitrary value we put on the words "real human." You're looking for ways to sift your kind of human from the humans who don't matter, and who can be consigned to the fate of animals. In fact, if you use the phrase "real humans" at all, my case is proven. That belief in a league table of humans - and the casual acceptance of it by nice people who were kind to animals and filled in their tax forms on time - led to the enslavement and murder of millions. It's slave-owner-think: it's Nazi-think. And yes, I bloody well hate it, and all those who think it. It's not about Jedi - who don't even exist. It's about you.' Why? The Clone Wars ones actually make *********** sense. In Karen Traviss' world the Mandalorians are a bunch of self-sufficient farmer-raiders. 1. In the new canon they're from a desert world. Which makes sense? Would the vikings have taken up the extremely dangerous profession of raiding coastal towns if they had everything they needed year round? No. 2. Karen Traviss' "Man'doa" 'language', according to her, did not have a method of expressing time until offworlders insisted on it. English has literally over a dozen methods of expressing units of time because our ancestors were a bunch of horse-raiders who needed precise means of expressing time for the purpose of coordination. This is another point that makes no sense. 3. According to Karen Traviss the Mandalorians are capable of fabricating a superior metal to a Galaxy-spanning civilization. This would be like the island nation of Anguilla being able to produce working power armor but the combined efforts of every other UN nation couldn't.