Three (really long) things about the Athosians, plus one about Pegasus.
I'm nearing the finish line at school, and thus the day when I might have time to do more than only think about writing! ... Meanwhile, though, thinking about writing's still all I can manage, but I got an itch to run something from one of my WIPs up the flagpole.
There's a story idea I came up with last year, about Teyla's childhood, which I haven't had a chance to touch in forever. I don't think I wrote more than 400 words of it, but today I remembered that I'd spent hours working out contextual details during my daily commute-by-foot last spring. Curious, I went looking to see if I still had any of the chat or email conversations where I'd bounced this off of other people.
Turns out I do. So for those of you who have been wondering just how much of a nerd I am when it comes to scaffolding my own stories:
Athosian lineal names [continued from an email where I laid out a whole naming convention]
Some Athosians choose to name themselves after Athos -- it's not something that's done frequently, because it indicates a commitment to the welfare of the Athosians above all else, in all things, and it does carry more of a role-commitment than naming yourself after a person does. Charin's lineal name is Eynathus -- the "u" inidicates past, so the name roughly means "daughter of Athos' past" and designates her as a keeper of Athosian tradition. If you pick that name, you're devoting yourself to maintaining the culture, rituals, and spiritual history of the Athosians. Halling, on the other had, names himself Esathiis, with "ii" indicating the future. Selecting that name commits you not just to a specific role within the Athosian community but to a specific sequence of steps in assuming that role. This is why he spends a good five-plus years after attaining adulthood as the primary child-tender -- so he can ensure that Athos's children grow up rooted in her traditions (Charin's explanation), so he can learn how to look after the needs of the group all at once (Tagan's), and so by the time he's middle-aged, everyone younger than he is will be in the habit of obeying him (Nyahel's).
If you're born in another culture and join the Athosian community (which is rare, usually just happening in whatever the Athosian equivalent of intermarriage is or rarely via adoption), your name indicates your history. For instance, John or Rodney would be called Esatlantus, while Ronon would be Esatedus.
Universal translators and written language [continued from an email where I puzzled out why everyone could understand each other's spoken languages but had to learn to read each others' alphabets]
So! I figured out how the rest of Pegasus gets by without text-translation: they all share an interplanetary written trade/treaty language, which is entirely idiographic and so doesn't require translation (each symbol means the same thing, regardless of what your native language is). It developed specifically to serve this purpose, so it's a bit restricted in its application (trying to write poetry with it would be a little like trying to write poetry in a programming language, for example) but has the benefit of being very clear and concrete.
Here's an example of the structure of the syntax, given that everything is idiographic. Assume that every word on the left-hand side of the equation represents one idiograph:
Past many actor: Teyla recipient: John hit use sticks context: spar = While sparring, Teyla hit (imperfect tense, meaning it happened more than once) John with sticks.
Future duration: cycle singular Earth actor: you recipient: us give code alternative future actor: us recipient: girl shoot = You have 24 hours to give us the code or we'll shoot the girl.
When it comes to things like foreign-language literature and poetry (since a lot of cultures have evolved their own writing systems), you have two options: get someone to teach you how to read the language (a massive pain) or get someone to read the work out loud to you so you can write it down in your own writing system (probably less time-consuming).
What the Athosians have been up to for the last 10,000 years, or: why a culture could be that well-connected yet still have no tech
I think that after the Ancients took off, the Wraith culled the crap out of the Athosians (and every other culture with settlements of any size or with any kind of extensive infrastructure -- they weren't stupid, they systematically hit all the cultures most likely to have/develop defensive/weapons text first). The Athosians nearly got wiped out on several occasions, and they lost pretty much all of their technical/scientific know-how in the process of trying to survive and find a safe, uninhabited planet to settle on.
Over time, the Athosians came to organize their culture around two main principles:
1. Self-sustenance in all circumstances. They become really focused on maintaining and passing on the knowledge needed to keep themselves healthy, fed, clothed, in shelter, and safe. They ended up purposefully passing on tech, because anything homemade would require infrastructure to get the raw materials and build, which would tie them to one place, and anything traded presented a danger of developing dependence without being able to control the source. They developed cultural practices that promote stability of population -- when times are peaceful, the population increase is pretty slow. They'll settle a planet for generations at a time, rotating their agriculture, hunting, and settlement (if needed) through the area around the stargate so as not to permanently deplete the resources in any one spot, but if something goes really wrong (i.e. a major culling), they'll leave everything they don't absolutely need and resettle to a new planet. They do make treaties and trade for things they can't make themselves (or for medical care, emergency help, etc), but they're very strategic about it.
Everyone within Athos spends their first fifteen years being rotated between the adults learning the basics of everything there is to know (to ensure that a disaster won't wipe out essential knowledge), but when you reach majority you choose your niche and enter into more serious mentorship with an adult occupying that niche (to ensure the advanced knowledge is passed from generation to generation). If there's no one in the current generation of kids who's got an inclination toward a particular area of knowledge, the adults will select and maneuver one of them into that niche anyway. It's your duty to accept gracefully if that happens.
2. Maintaining a basic level of interplanetary "civilization" of the human settlements of Pegasus for when the Ancients return. They believe the Ancestors will return someday, and (having over the centuries developed the idea that the Ancestors were a stern-but-loving parent culture and not superior, self-obsessed, quasi-amoral jackasses who viewed humans kind of the way we view golden retrievers or chimps) they think the Ancestors'll be pissed if they've let the galaxy totally go to shit over the intervening centuries. So they've become kind of the designated mediators, go-betweens, and impartial peace-brokers of Pegasus. If you're looking to set up an alliance with a culture you've had no contact with, or make a treaty to settle a war, and you absolutely can't get it done on your own, you get an Athosian go-between. There are a few people on Athos in every generation who take on this role -- Tagan is one of them, and Teyla chooses to be mentored into it when she reaches adulthood (15, on Athos). The thing is that if you prove yourself untrustworthy to the Athosians -- by screwing them or someone they help you broker a deal with -- they won't have anything to do with you for a long, long time (generations at least). As far as they're concerned, you aren't living up to the standards that humanity needs to hold for the Ancestors and it's better that you be cut off. Being blacklisted by the Athosians is really bad for your rep among the people who aren't.
Romantic attachments and procreative imperatives among Athosian adults
Since Athosians raise children communally and don't really have private property per se (all food and supplies are communal, you barter favors with people if you need something specific done, land ownership is a totally bizarre idea to them -- why tie yourself to dirt?), there go two of the main pressures for developing exclusive pair-bonding. It's totally fine for you to fall in love and form a long-term bond with someone, having multiple casual partners is somewhat discouraged (it's accepted that it'll happen among some of the youngest adults, but it's seen as immature and destabilizing to the community), and having different monogamous bonds to different people over your life span is considered normal. People from other cultures are welcome to marry into Athos (not that they have marriage as such, but you know what I mean), but they really try to steer Athosians away from marrying out and leaving (though you're not cut off if you do, provided you do it on good terms and maintain your connections back home). There are some traditions that you invoke to indicate the seriousness of your attachment to someone else, but invoking them doesn't make you "married" in the sense of a legal binding-together.
Procreative imperatives are ... complicated. You're expected to reproduce yourself at least at a 1:1 ratio, with more being better, but in times of peace and stability you're allowed a lot of leeway about how soon you get on that (though if you hit around thirty and haven't had kids, you start getting a lot of communal pressure). If you don't have kids at all, you'd better be contributing like hell to the community in some other way, and it's still considered a bit of a failure. If a disaster, culling, or sickness occurs and more than a couple dozen people are lost, women of child-bearing age are expected to start getting pregnant within a couple months of things settling down. That said, if trying to carry a child to term poses significant risk to you or the child, or if you're occupying a vital role where pregnancy would substantially interfere, then you're partially exempt from that expectation.
There's a story idea I came up with last year, about Teyla's childhood, which I haven't had a chance to touch in forever. I don't think I wrote more than 400 words of it, but today I remembered that I'd spent hours working out contextual details during my daily commute-by-foot last spring. Curious, I went looking to see if I still had any of the chat or email conversations where I'd bounced this off of other people.
Turns out I do. So for those of you who have been wondering just how much of a nerd I am when it comes to scaffolding my own stories:
Athosian lineal names [continued from an email where I laid out a whole naming convention]
Some Athosians choose to name themselves after Athos -- it's not something that's done frequently, because it indicates a commitment to the welfare of the Athosians above all else, in all things, and it does carry more of a role-commitment than naming yourself after a person does. Charin's lineal name is Eynathus -- the "u" inidicates past, so the name roughly means "daughter of Athos' past" and designates her as a keeper of Athosian tradition. If you pick that name, you're devoting yourself to maintaining the culture, rituals, and spiritual history of the Athosians. Halling, on the other had, names himself Esathiis, with "ii" indicating the future. Selecting that name commits you not just to a specific role within the Athosian community but to a specific sequence of steps in assuming that role. This is why he spends a good five-plus years after attaining adulthood as the primary child-tender -- so he can ensure that Athos's children grow up rooted in her traditions (Charin's explanation), so he can learn how to look after the needs of the group all at once (Tagan's), and so by the time he's middle-aged, everyone younger than he is will be in the habit of obeying him (Nyahel's).
If you're born in another culture and join the Athosian community (which is rare, usually just happening in whatever the Athosian equivalent of intermarriage is or rarely via adoption), your name indicates your history. For instance, John or Rodney would be called Esatlantus, while Ronon would be Esatedus.
Universal translators and written language [continued from an email where I puzzled out why everyone could understand each other's spoken languages but had to learn to read each others' alphabets]
So! I figured out how the rest of Pegasus gets by without text-translation: they all share an interplanetary written trade/treaty language, which is entirely idiographic and so doesn't require translation (each symbol means the same thing, regardless of what your native language is). It developed specifically to serve this purpose, so it's a bit restricted in its application (trying to write poetry with it would be a little like trying to write poetry in a programming language, for example) but has the benefit of being very clear and concrete.
Here's an example of the structure of the syntax, given that everything is idiographic. Assume that every word on the left-hand side of the equation represents one idiograph:
Past many actor: Teyla recipient: John hit use sticks context: spar = While sparring, Teyla hit (imperfect tense, meaning it happened more than once) John with sticks.
Future duration: cycle singular Earth actor: you recipient: us give code alternative future actor: us recipient: girl shoot = You have 24 hours to give us the code or we'll shoot the girl.
When it comes to things like foreign-language literature and poetry (since a lot of cultures have evolved their own writing systems), you have two options: get someone to teach you how to read the language (a massive pain) or get someone to read the work out loud to you so you can write it down in your own writing system (probably less time-consuming).
What the Athosians have been up to for the last 10,000 years, or: why a culture could be that well-connected yet still have no tech
I think that after the Ancients took off, the Wraith culled the crap out of the Athosians (and every other culture with settlements of any size or with any kind of extensive infrastructure -- they weren't stupid, they systematically hit all the cultures most likely to have/develop defensive/weapons text first). The Athosians nearly got wiped out on several occasions, and they lost pretty much all of their technical/scientific know-how in the process of trying to survive and find a safe, uninhabited planet to settle on.
Over time, the Athosians came to organize their culture around two main principles:
1. Self-sustenance in all circumstances. They become really focused on maintaining and passing on the knowledge needed to keep themselves healthy, fed, clothed, in shelter, and safe. They ended up purposefully passing on tech, because anything homemade would require infrastructure to get the raw materials and build, which would tie them to one place, and anything traded presented a danger of developing dependence without being able to control the source. They developed cultural practices that promote stability of population -- when times are peaceful, the population increase is pretty slow. They'll settle a planet for generations at a time, rotating their agriculture, hunting, and settlement (if needed) through the area around the stargate so as not to permanently deplete the resources in any one spot, but if something goes really wrong (i.e. a major culling), they'll leave everything they don't absolutely need and resettle to a new planet. They do make treaties and trade for things they can't make themselves (or for medical care, emergency help, etc), but they're very strategic about it.
Everyone within Athos spends their first fifteen years being rotated between the adults learning the basics of everything there is to know (to ensure that a disaster won't wipe out essential knowledge), but when you reach majority you choose your niche and enter into more serious mentorship with an adult occupying that niche (to ensure the advanced knowledge is passed from generation to generation). If there's no one in the current generation of kids who's got an inclination toward a particular area of knowledge, the adults will select and maneuver one of them into that niche anyway. It's your duty to accept gracefully if that happens.
2. Maintaining a basic level of interplanetary "civilization" of the human settlements of Pegasus for when the Ancients return. They believe the Ancestors will return someday, and (having over the centuries developed the idea that the Ancestors were a stern-but-loving parent culture and not superior, self-obsessed, quasi-amoral jackasses who viewed humans kind of the way we view golden retrievers or chimps) they think the Ancestors'll be pissed if they've let the galaxy totally go to shit over the intervening centuries. So they've become kind of the designated mediators, go-betweens, and impartial peace-brokers of Pegasus. If you're looking to set up an alliance with a culture you've had no contact with, or make a treaty to settle a war, and you absolutely can't get it done on your own, you get an Athosian go-between. There are a few people on Athos in every generation who take on this role -- Tagan is one of them, and Teyla chooses to be mentored into it when she reaches adulthood (15, on Athos). The thing is that if you prove yourself untrustworthy to the Athosians -- by screwing them or someone they help you broker a deal with -- they won't have anything to do with you for a long, long time (generations at least). As far as they're concerned, you aren't living up to the standards that humanity needs to hold for the Ancestors and it's better that you be cut off. Being blacklisted by the Athosians is really bad for your rep among the people who aren't.
Romantic attachments and procreative imperatives among Athosian adults
Since Athosians raise children communally and don't really have private property per se (all food and supplies are communal, you barter favors with people if you need something specific done, land ownership is a totally bizarre idea to them -- why tie yourself to dirt?), there go two of the main pressures for developing exclusive pair-bonding. It's totally fine for you to fall in love and form a long-term bond with someone, having multiple casual partners is somewhat discouraged (it's accepted that it'll happen among some of the youngest adults, but it's seen as immature and destabilizing to the community), and having different monogamous bonds to different people over your life span is considered normal. People from other cultures are welcome to marry into Athos (not that they have marriage as such, but you know what I mean), but they really try to steer Athosians away from marrying out and leaving (though you're not cut off if you do, provided you do it on good terms and maintain your connections back home). There are some traditions that you invoke to indicate the seriousness of your attachment to someone else, but invoking them doesn't make you "married" in the sense of a legal binding-together.
Procreative imperatives are ... complicated. You're expected to reproduce yourself at least at a 1:1 ratio, with more being better, but in times of peace and stability you're allowed a lot of leeway about how soon you get on that (though if you hit around thirty and haven't had kids, you start getting a lot of communal pressure). If you don't have kids at all, you'd better be contributing like hell to the community in some other way, and it's still considered a bit of a failure. If a disaster, culling, or sickness occurs and more than a couple dozen people are lost, women of child-bearing age are expected to start getting pregnant within a couple months of things settling down. That said, if trying to carry a child to term poses significant risk to you or the child, or if you're occupying a vital role where pregnancy would substantially interfere, then you're partially exempt from that expectation.