Episode #204: Language Makes The Mundane Intriguing

This city view of Hartford CT was taken over a decade ago and is for illustrative purposes only, but man, this was the peak of cleanliness for this part of the city.

I love different languages, or rather, I love listening to different languages. When I was residing at my last state agency {2006-20}, I truly enjoyed the white noise that was predominately Spanish in my humble office (Payroll/HR}, and in fact actively moaned whenever my "white noise" wasn't there.

So fast forward to now.

Because of that fondness for foreign languages, I tried to incorporate as much as I possibly could into my current 4 volume series with the blogger tag of Hot Mess. So this fondness has morphed in the following ways:

1.  I started off everyone speaking English, but when I had female MC #1 Myla's ladies-in-waiting make an appearance, I had her speaking Spanish to them. 
2. Eventually down the road I had her ladies-in-waiting switch to understanding Portuguese, because why not.
3. With female MC #2, I need a language that could be used for certain private conversations, so I introduced Greek to the mix.
4. Note: I did not use the actual Spanish/Portuguese/Greek language for the conversations. Using a tip that an editor of mine nicely informed me of and of which I saw being used elsewhere, I simply stated at the beginning of the conversation what language was actually being used.
5. Here's where it gets quite interesting. As I needed to do background research for a few characters, I had to perform a shallow dive to find out what kind of language was used and a deeper dive to find, if any, a Google translate for that language.
6. For my male MC, because I had him working for the Aztecs {note, for kicks and giggles, I love turning cold, impersonal historical entities into ruthless business conglomos} prior to getting married a second time, I decided to have as his second language, Nahuatl, which is what the Aztecs spoke.
7. Not to leave any of the other female MC's out, I had #2 & #3 speak Quechua, which was and still is, the native language of the Incans. This is in addition to the Spanish/Portuguese/Greek/English. As for #4, in addition to her speaking English & Portuguese, I also have her speaking Nahuatl as well.
8. Now just for other ha-ha's, because I had to create a whole other planet, I had to create a whole new language, which was spoken by female #1, as well as the denizens of the planet itself.
9. And all of this isn't even adding in the fact that telepathy is being used as a base of communication, no matter the species. Or the fact that a couple of the MC's understand avian and jaguar. And can't forget the legendary hounds of Hell, Cerberus. Two minor characters know Morse code, while three other semi-minor characters speak in sign language {I decided not to differentiate between ASL & BSL}.

So as you can see, I have run the whole gamut with the languages being used in this series. And for an added bonus, I have made a concentrated effort to add the necessary background info for everyone involved, which breaks down to: Central and South America {Aztec and Inca}, North America {US}, Europe {possibly late medieval/early modern U.K. and the mainland for a time period} and of course, the Pod Planet. So that way, I'm not using the languages for the sake of using them.

Next week will be a lighter post about this and that, before I start a Mariana Trench dive into the characters that make up this series. I think this will be something that will make you go, "I did not know that about G.B."

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