Let's Learn Gnomish: Grammar / Sentence Structure
@Kosher Dill called in sick, so I'm taking over for today.
The most prominent feature of the Gnomish language is its extremely complex and ambiguous sentence structure, characterized by heavy use of adverbs, embedded clauses, and run-on sentences that stretch over dozens of tweets at a time like Virgil's immaculate hexameter.
Gnomish has an elaborate system of humble and honorific speech, comparable to that of Japanese or Korean, but serving a completely different purpose. The aforementioned Far Eastern languages use honorific speech to emphasize the speaker's manners and social intelligence. Gnomish's system of honorifics serves the exact opposite purpose: its purpose is to
obfuscate the identities of the parties involved, and to create plausible deniability in the event that they have no idea what the fuck they're talking about (which they never do) or come off as a creep (which they always do).
Take this excerpt from one of Jake's lesser-known works,
"The Workification of Games". Words that distract from, mollify, or obfuscate the writer's point are highlighted in
bold:
RPGs then became kind of a thing. They got longer and more involved. There was a stretch where basically, every 5 years, the amount of time you had to sink into a single RPG to see the ending doubled, until they turned into these 80+ hour Commitments. It isn’t “today I think I’m going to sit down and play Xenogears before dinner.” It’s “this month I’m going to spend like 4 hours between getting home and making dinner playing Xenogears, should be finished by the 30th or so.” And hey, whoops! That’s a job now! In my own personal experience, that was literally a job. I spent some time reviewing games professionally. I was being paid by the article, and seeing the game through before reviewing it was a policy at that outlet, so, yeah. I had to sit down with these big 80 hour epics and slog through them, getting in as many hours as I could each day, just like some people had to gostand behind a counter flipping hamburgers or sit at a desk making phone calls. A full on job.
Now granted, at the time, it was mainly just RPGs that did that, and most people didn’t literally play them for a living. So OK you have your one big PROJECT of a game to slowly chip through and then everything else you’re playing is relatively light. Only relatively though, because hey, RPGs were the first genre to really get LONG, and took it to the greatest extremes, but damn near ALL games in the mid-90s could be counted on to have some main story-progression mode too long to be played in a single sitting, with save files to maintain your progress. And that PROGRESSION creep never went away. Super Mario Odyssey has somewhere around 1000 moons for you to go find before you can say you’re done. That’s a pretty sizeable commitment to plug away at.
These characteristic features are
strongly amplified when the speaker is trying to make a point or persuade someone.
The Gnomish people take great pride in their linguistic and rhetorical skills. Gnomish secondary school students are trained in the
Moldbug School of Argumentation, which involves making a point so nuanced, overqualified, and long-winded that anyone trying to refute it would have to use the majority of their working memory and brainpower just to comprehend what the other person is saying, leaving none to actually refute the point.
For illustrative purposes, I have manually diagrammed Jake's
203-word opus:
View attachment jake_alley_sentence_structure_aligned.png
Adept students of linguistics will notice more than a few mistakes and elisions, in addition to a handful of nodes where I wrote "SHIT" or "FUCK" in lieu of a fitting label. This is because my brain glucose levels have been depleted by Jake's brilliant rhetoric, to the point where I am no longer capable of walking or talking autonomously. I wrote this post by dictating it to a team of handlers through an elaborate code of finger and eye movements.