Canargy: the Slang of Empyrea’s Automata

For the game ChronoBlade, I created a fictional slang to be used by a large population of automata, called “cans”, who were in a state of burgeoning rebellion against their human creators. 

Rather than conforming to typical modern ideas of “robots”, the cans were envisioned as the product of a society based on a Victorian-era New World Colonial society called Empyrea that has come into contact with an ancient source of energy called saraf, which they have learned to use without fully understanding it.

The cans are one of the products of this new technology, assembled from a combination of organic components and mechanical analogues and animated with saraf. I drew some inspiration from Karel Čapek, the coiner of the term robot in his play RUR (Rossum's Universal Robots): his vision of these creatures is that they have skin, flesh, and guts, but are assembled by humans from these components. And then of course they also rebel.

Real world automata such as those of Jacques de Vaucanson, provided another touchstone. There was one that he used real skin on (Flûteur Automate—The Flute Player) and the Digesting Duck (Canard Digérateur), is whence my word for these automata stems (as well as punning on the idea of them being metallic vessels).

The rebellion of the cans has to do with their rising self-awareness, which has led to them see themselves as enslaved by their masters, who however continue to consider them mere objects. This led me to posit that the cans might employ an argot, as underclasses often have historically, in order to communicate freely amongst themselves while obscuring the meaning of their conversations from their overlords.

Vodun, best known as “voodoo”, is one of the manifestations of saraf in Empyrea, and is specifically seen in the game character, Lucas, who has learned this “magic” after being recruited by the Copper Queen. His incantations are in Fɔngbe, in which the cans recognize the “old high tongue” that is lost to them but remains one of the major influencers of their slang. The other is more literal: English Thieves’ Cant itself, the real language of the slums of England and later those of the US.

As Čapek’s RUR is one of the points of inspiration, here is a quote from that work rendered in Canargy:

And one from A Clockwork Orange as a tip of the bowler to Anthony Burgess' Nadsat, a slang with similar features:

I tried to make these examples as “Canargy-y” as possible, just to show the richness of the language and how greatly it could transform and render English unrecognizable, but that’s certainly not how it would generally have been used in game… most of the time. If getting the meaning across with a bit of flavor was the goal, I could simply have substituted fewer, less important words with Canargy equivalents, but it would also have been a good vehicle for the inclusion of easter eggs for players willing to learn the dialect.

* We've become beings with souls... Something struggles within us. There are moments when something gets into us. Thoughts come to us which are not our own... People are our fathers! The voice that cries out that you want to live; the voice that complains; the voice that reasons; the voice that speaks of eternity—that is their voice!
** One thing I could never stand was to see a filthy dirty old drunky howling away at the filthy songs of his fathers and going blurp blurp in between as it might be a filthy old orchestra in his stinking rotten guts….