sphennings

We can read the edit history if we want to know how a post has changed over time. Adding tons of edit markers to a post just clutter it. Please remove them and edit any relevant information they contain to fit seamlessly into the post.

@MontyWild Anthropologist have done studies of certain hunter gatherer communities tracking both time spent per activity, and the calories accuired from hunting and foraging. So this type of question is at least theoretically answerable. You're right that the answer is entirely dependent on the specifics of every aspect of the environment they live in, making this question a poor fit for our format.

Please remember that a question being well received is no indicator of whether it belongs on this site or not. Have you considered trying the alternative approach to questions that I have suggested?

Instead of asking us for ideas that meet a long set of requirements how about you do the idea generation yourself, and then when you're fleshing out the details of one specific design, if you encounter a problem, ask for help solving it. Don't ask us to provide ideas, provide us an idea you are having a specific problem with. Some examples of what I mean: Pretend that shooting them is your idea, ask us for help figuring out what common caliber will penetrate. Or ask if jellyfish have parasites, to determine what you need to handwave for a bioengineered solution.

Why do you need to shoot them full of bullets when as you say they're filled with a flammable gas and prone to explode? Seems like hitting a 3m target from a safe distance with an incendiary round should be sufficient to clear a temporary path through a field of the critters. It appears that you're fishing for a certain type of idea from us and are dissatisfied when we point out possible solutions that don't fit what you imagine. Instead of asking us to brainstorm (which is not permitted on this site) how about you try building your own solution and ask us for help with any problems you have.

@IMP9024 Perhaps in your world your critter has parasites. Especially since you've already established that these are engineered critters, with new types every year, you'd assume that they'd be engineered with proprietary methods to render them safe for your own troops, or that the same engineering skill used to release new updates yearly could be applied to engineer other critters. That handwave permits anything you can come up with. That's the cool thing about handwaving, any idea you can generate, anything you can brainstorm can be possible in your world if you want.

My insect repellent works for a few hours. Less if I'm working hard, is that enough? Does it need to be accessible to civilians? Is a solution that is regularly updated, like yearly flu shots, acceptable?

What do you mean by near future tech? You can always handwave whatever of magic clearing you want if your world has that. You imply that these creatures are engineered, which opens this answer up to any sort of engineered anti-critter critter as a whole range of possible solutions including , engineered pathogens, disabling parasites, or predators of any size. What makes an area sufficiently safe for travel? A mine clearing charge, makes a very short narrow lane safe, for a limited amount of time , is that enough? Or do you need hundreds of miles to be clear for unprepared travelers for weeks?

Given the range of weapons that humans use what makes you think that it would be any less open ended with cats?

Knowing the impact on speech production gives you something to base arbitrary speculation about linguistic shifts on.

You can go over an IPA chart and say these sounds are going to be easier, these sounds are more difficult, these sounds are probably impossible. Tonality as meaningful element of speech is something like low mid high, not tied to a specific notes. However lower pressure does imply that every sound produced will be pitched up like with helium. This may mean that certain elements of individual phonemes will get shifted out of the audible range but to answer that requires spectrographic analysis deep in the weeds of linguistics research.

While there are some patterns to linguistic drift, they are far from hard rules, cultural pressures often play at least as much of a factor. Ultimately any chain of logic that OP likes for the drift is likely to be accepted by their audience. Especially if they just want a window dressing, there’s no reason to try to root it in a level of determinacy that the field of linguistics lacks.

I’m sensing a bit of an X Y problem. I’m guessing what OP ultimately wants is either a pressure adapted conlang, or the ability to describe its speech in the text of some work. It seems like OP doesn’t know enough about linguistics to know what the right questions to ask even are. No disrespect meant to OP with that. Determining the right question to ask is often the hardest part.

@JBH See my suggestion to OP from two days ago. Instead of asking for a survey of every feature of language linguists have ever documented, start by asking how does a lower pressure atmosphere impact speech production, perhaps ask if certain sounds become impossible to produce. Importantly instead of looking at every aspect of language or even how it could influence phonetic drift in an OP specified language, just look at how it impacts the production of speech.

@JBH regarding the edit: asking what qualitative ways a vocal language can differ from English is still asking for a list of every aspect of language that linguists could possibly study. It’s still effectively the same question as before. I appreciate continuing to try to workshop this question. However just an overview of the elements that make an answer to it are most of a linguistics 101 course. This fails the book test.

Regarding your most recent edit: You are still asking the same core question in bold. As such your edit fails to address any of the concerns that have been raised. See my previous comment about what it means to describe a language. Perhaps try doing a complete rewrite instead of editing piecemeal. You seem to be unsure how a different atmosphere will impact speech production. Asking about that might be more useful to you if you don’t have much of a linguistic background.

If you want to know what sounds are more practical, it might be better to just ask that. The issues with your question remain because the issues I identified exist in the core ask of the question. Although an alternative reading could be that you’re asking us to list and explain all the ways linguists categorize languages. Just an overview of that is an entire college course. That’s also too broad a question for this site.

Given the diversity of languages on earth and the apparent lack of correlation between language features and environmental conditions beyond those better explained by sharing a common ancestor, what makes you think that there is any way for us to answer this question with anything other than idle speculation? Asking to both speculate on environmental adaptations and then speculate on how those will impact language is similarly too broad and open ended to be a good fit for this site.

If we're speculating based on facts you have to accept that different people may come to different conclusions than your own. Hence Monty's answer saying that it depends. You can speculate either way in your world.

Scientists disagree on how to interpret data all the time. Especially when there is an incredibly limited amount of data to go on there can be more than one valid theory that can't be falsified until new analytical techniques or new discoveries make it possible to do so. For instance we can't look up any facts about how dinosaurs would do in the midst of an ice age, or how they would compete for resources with the megafauna of the day. Both of those impact how much rapid adaptation is required for critters to survive.

Unfortunately those are necessary details to answer your question. You seem to have a particular answer you want to hear. If that's the case just go with that.

There’s more than clutch size and reproductive interval that matters, theres also time to maturity, and survival rate to maturity. See the below answer as a very complete explanation of why we simply don’t know enough to answer this question.

This looks like an X Y problem where you can't solve your actual problem, X, but you think that if you can solve a different problem, Y, and believe that solving Y will get you closer to solving X. What are you actually struggling with? Why do you think knowing whether reproductive rates will prevent mammalian megafauna survival will get you closer to solving it?

If dinosaurs fail to survive being dumped into the ice age, then megafauna reproductive rates probably don't matter. However, if they do matter, how much is going to depend on how well dinosaurs are doing at surviving, their rate of adaptation, and how much mammals need to adapt in return, which impacts how much dinosaurs need to adapt to these adaptations, and so on and so on. I'm not sure how we can answer whether reproductive rates are the keystone factor impacting mammalian survival when it is part of such a broad and complicated question.

Perhaps the issue isn’t mammals vs dinosaurs but slow to mature megafauna vs smaller faster breeding, quicker to adapt, generalist critters? Look at which animals have thrived in cities and suburbs?

It seems like the answer to your question hinges on far more than just mammalian reproductive rates. Dropping any critter in a new environment can be dicey. Sometimes you get invasive species, usually they quickly die. To answer this depends on whether dinosaurs can survive long enough to reproduce, and their reproductive rate to adapt to their new environment, just as much as it does for your mammalian megafauna. Do we even know what their time to maturity, and infant mortality rates are? That’s too broad a question to ask us all at once.

Did your elephants just magically appear in the Jurassic? Did T. rex magically appear in the Anthropocene? If you got to the point through evolutionary means we can assume that the critters that exist, are capable of surviving unless their circumstances change. Are you just focusing on predation or competition for food and water?

Keep in mind that the megafauna of today evolved without needing to compete with dinosaurs, if they coevolved they would have adapted to circumstances including predatory megafauna. It seems a bit strange to ask us to consider things on evolutionary time scales without taking into account that if you assume elephants have evolved that they haven’t adapted to the predators in their environment. Perhaps this improves their birth rate, perhaps this reduces their rate of predation. We can’t say.

The motivation for that question was a series of low quality questions on the tag getting closed. Even the answers arguing for the retention of the tag acknowledge this is an issue, they just suggest different approaches to address it than removing the infrastructure that supports it.

The ACS tag imposes additional restrictions on question in addition to those required of every question on our highly opinionated question and answer site. You have been bumping up against this structure a lot recently. When this happens you have a tendency to lash out and tell the people who create and enforce those policies that they are wrong, and targeting you. Have you considered that perhaps you have some mistaken assumptions about how written policies have been interpreted and enforced?

To compare that question to yours the most important difference is that they are asking how about a fantastical trait. That is the core spirit of the ACS tag. Mundane traits are not an appropriate use of the tag. We would not accept an question about an ACS goat, or an ACS elf or orc for this reason. Even then this question was challenged until issues were addressed. Since that question, we have become less tolerant of low effort ACS questions.

@IMP9024 We evaluate every question across a range of factors, not just amount of detail. None of the reasons for why your question was closed, presented by L.Dutch or myself relate to the amount of detail itself. Those reasons have been explained above. I should remind you that upvotes have never been an indication of a questions suitability for this site.

Goodnight.

For the third time asking about how a creature evolved is a misuse of the ACS tag.

I have already explained how that interpretation of the ACS guidelines is incorrect. It’s late and I’m not in the mood to argue in circles about this.

I described an ACS dragon above. Another example would be asking how thick a giants bones would be to support its weight.

When we keep telling you that your question is not suitable. Telling us that it is does nothing to address our concerns. Note how I keep clarifying site policy to you.

The requirement to describe the creature is intended to discourage just dropping a name and leaving it up to us to figure out what you’re actually asking about. There still needs to be a meaningful question in there. For instance we would not accept ACS pig because the question is moot.

You may want to workshop this in the sandbox instead of arguing in the comments. Addressing the concerns raised is much more likely to result in a question being reopened.

As you yourself said they’re about “how to describe fictional or mythological creatures” 1. The creature is already described. 2. Asking how it evolved has nothing to do with its description. If there was some fantastic element we would consider discussing an evolutionarily plausible form of that element while discussing how to describe it. Consider for example asking about an ACS dragon, we would discuss a physically plausible description of its wings and an evolutionary plausible description for breathing fire.

What I always recommend is to try solving this yourself and if you encounter a problem, ask us for help resolving that specific issue. This is the best way to transform an overly broad question into one that is suitable for this site.

ACS is not about how did x evolve. That means that your use of the tag is incorrect. In the text of your question you ask us to design the creature. If that’s not your question then you have some serious editing to do to make sure that it’s clear what you’re actually asking about. I would discourage you from asking how would x evolve because there’s often many different way that creatures with similar characteristics can evolve. This makes it very easy to run afoul of our prohibitions on story based questions or questions with many equally valid answers.

This question has other issues, beyond the misuse of the ACS format. 1. We're not here to build creatures on demand. The expectation is that you present a specific worldbuilding problem you are encountering and ask us for help resolving that. 2. The question is already answered rendering its asking moot. The creatures anatomy is already described in full. In the asking of the question, you already provided an answer. Either of these on their own is enough to justify closing a question.

@MontyWild not as written. Where's the worldbuilding problem specific to them? I just see a discussion prompt about Tolkien's elves and Games Workshop's Eldar. Any worldbuilder can resolve this however they want. My favorite choice is Pratchett's that's just how elves are. They're analyzing existing works of fiction, not asking a question about elves in their world.

@gaazkam The point KerrAvon is trying to make is that your question doesn't seem to be about a specific worldbuilding problem you're having and is therefore unsuitable for this site.

This reads like an attempt to open a discussion and open ended analysis of existing works or fiction. Do you have a specific worldbuilding problem you want help with?

In short your question is too broad and your criteria don’t do enough to narrow it down.

If simply saying they have a shared language is a valid answer then why are you asking us this question?

Can you explain how a conlang wouldn’t meet your criteria because to me any conlang I can come up with will.

We're not mind readers. This is part of why we use a structured Q&A format. Clear questions with a narrow scope make it easier to write high quality answers. That's why the VTC system exists. If you're frustrated with the answers you're receiving, which judging by edits seems to be the case, try writing a clearer more specific question from the start. Tacking on edit block after edit block makes it harder for someone to quickly understand what you're looking for and write an answer that delivers upon that.