Welp, that thing was pretty clearly not designed by anyone with linguistic training. It’s mostly a mapping between glyphs and English letters rather than sounds, although there are also a few digraphs.
The chart has glyphs that claim to correspond to “C”, “Q” and “X”. What does that mean? Given that there are also glyphs for “K”, “S”, “Kh” and “Ch”, what sounds would the first three represent? Is the “Th” glyph voiced or voiceless? Does the “J” glyph represent the bizarre English J sound /dʒ/ or the /j/ that it represents in most other European languages? The chart doesn’t seem to be useful for anything except maybe as a simple cipher for English.
Galactic Basic was once spoken across the universe, but then Bill Gates bought it, folded parts of it into Microsoft Basic, and discarded the rest.
The FTC tried to make Microsoft unbundle Galactic Basic, but most people have either stuck with Microsoft Basic out of inertia, or moved to either Galactic Linux or Galactic iOS.
A cancelled novel would have established that humans were from the same universe as THX-1138 is set in, but sent back into the past (and far, far away).
I’m proud to say that at my design studio, we hired whoever was creative, no matter what their age or credentials. But that made for amusing lunchtime topics like “Why won’t you kids (who’ve never been to college) even TRY to understand Finnegan’s Wake?”
So one of the PhDs came in just after Star Wars debuted (no New Hope back then…), and complained “Okay, okay, I saw it. No, I did not like it. Why does every movie set in the future just assume that people will still be solving their problems with violence?”
Four of us turned to him and all said "But it’s not the future. It’s a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away!
I still chuckle that we said that in unison, with the affronted pride of nerds defending their realm.
Definitely in a fantasy universe. One in which faster-than-light travel is possible and doesn’t result in time travel into the past. And nobody thinks to use this magic space drive directly as a weapon until centuries or millenia after it’s invented.
I was always under the impression the basis for setting it “A long time ago” was to prevent people from hypothesizing Star Wars took place in an alternate universe where the Nazis won and went to space.
If a fictional alien language exists only in written form, chances are it’s either pure gibberish, or a cipher of English. The latter allows the reader/viewer to decipher it, themselves, while still looking alien.
If one examines the totality of the evidence about the Star Wars “humans” - that they look like humans, they speak English, they (the Empire) use the English written language/alphabet, the hero is called Luke Sky(+)walker - the logical conclusion must surely be that the “humans” of the Star Wars universe and Earth humans are related. This could either be through future humans from our world travelling back in time and populating the long-ago universe, or colonizers from the Star Wars galaxy populating our world - if they were travelling at faster the speed of light for millennia/millions of years, then it’s possible they devolved back to bipedal apes, and they lost their technological knowledge in the computer/droid-run spaceship, but retained their English-language capabilities.
The alien languages in Star Wars have always been gibberish laid over English syntax. It never occurred to Lucas that anything more was required.
Of course? Other than Tolkien, constructing a plausible fictional language wasn’t really done. It wasn’t until Mark Okrand was engaged to create the Klingon language that it started to become part of contemporary fiction.
Even now not everyone does it. George R. R. Martin didn’t do it for Ive and Fire.
But I find it irritating in the Star Wars movies when I hear a putative alien language that obviously has the structure of English. Why not just have them speak English?
One example is Nien Nunb, the Sullustan co-pilot for Lando on the Millennium Falcon during Return of the Jedi, who was voiced by a Kenyan named Bill Kipsang Rotich. Rotich used lines from two African languages, Kikuyu and Haya, for Nien Nunb’s dialog.
As related to me by my former pastor, who had grown up in Kenya, the Kenyans loved that character, because they understood his lines in their native language.
I always thought it was strange and proof that there was some earth/Star Wars universe connection that the Millennium Falcon had the name “Falcon” in it, which is a bird found on earth. I guess the Millennium Porg just doesn’t have the same ring to it. I am aware it was officially named after the bat-falcon.
My take on it: “Basic” is the most common language spoken in the Star Wars galaxy. It’s not actually English, and probably doesn’t sound or look at all like English, but it’s the language that people are expected to know without translation, and so the movie presents it as English (both in spoken and, originally, written form). In the same way, there is one species out of many that is the predominant species in the galaxy. They’re not humans, and they probably don’t even look at all like humans, but they’re the species that everyone is expected to recognize as looking “normal”, and so the movies depict that species as humans.
I kind of see it like this too. I use this kind of philosophy for pretty much all fiction (espcially fantasy and sci-fi) – something like the following: in the “infinite multiverse of existence”, all stories really have happened and/or will happen, including stories like Star Wars. The author/creator just happened to pluck this story from the aether, and is presenting it the best way they can, on the page or the screen or whatever. There might be little mistakes, or adaptive choices (like showing the characters as human, and the language as English), but that doesn’t change the “true” version of the story. This was just an adaptation of something out there in the aether.
That assumes they mean long ago from now, and far away from here. But that’s not necessarily the case.
If you ask, “When was The Princess Bride set?” the answer is “The mid-1980s.” Because that’s the setting where the sick kid is told a story by his grandpa. All the sword fights and stuff is what the grandpa tells the kid. Similarly, the setting for Star Wars is, technically, whatever setting the person who starts off with, “A long time ago…” is in. But we don’t know that person’s setting, or who they are. You’re assuming that the referent was America circa 1977. But it could equally be “Luke Skywalker’s nth generation descendant sharing family lore.”
As for the idea that the characters are supposed to be speaking English in-universe - no. No more than the Nazis in a WWII movie are supposed to be speaking English to each other in private. It’s a convention for English-speaking audiences, not an attempt at world-building.
I suppose technically Star Wars is set in “our universe” (a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away). But from a narrative perspective, no, they are not. That is to say, Earth is not part of Star Wars lore, nor does anything in Star Wars have a shared history with anything from Earth.
As someone else pointed out, the fact that the characters speak what sounds like English, look human and possibly reference items that are called the same thing on Earth is just a convention for the audience to let you know they serve the same purpose. This is different from other sci-fi works like Dune, Issac Asimov’s Foundation series, or Battlestar Galactica.
Similarly, the world of Game of Thrones could take place on an alien planet peopled by aliens, an “alternate Earth”, an alien planet in “our” universe where the “First Men” were perhaps Earth colonists who regressed technologically and whose origins were forgotten or it could be something even more exotic. But it’s not explored because it’s not relevant to the story.
Actually, the anthology “Tales From The Mos Eisly Cantina”, which was canon until Disney took over and decanonized almost everything, has two connections directly to Earth. In the story The Pipe Smoker, it is stated that he is smoking a rare hard to get herb called t’bacco from a planet called Earth in another galaxy.
Another story has Luke Skywalker Himself enjoying a cup of hot chocolate, another hard to get luxury from some obscure planet called Earth in another galaxy.
I may be a bit off on some of the details, it’s been many years since I lost my copy of the book, but those two connections are there
