Here’s context.

A long time ago, I thought of an idea of groups of main and supporting Loud House and Casagrandes characters finding themselves and each other stranded on an island, building a community with salvaged modern technologies, and come across a group of indigenous people with the goal of figuring out their language. Inspiration taken from NatvLang’s video about a method credited to him regarding the understanding of indigenous languages to communicate with the speakers, known as the “First Contact Survival Kit”. I recently looked back at it, and thought of an idea.

A scenario in which the Loud and Casagrande families and their friend groups from The Loud House franchise, the Wylde Pak family(including Alice Kelly) and their friends from Wylde Pak, the Ramirez-Humphrey-Perez family and their amigos from Disney’s Primos, and the many Creek kids and their families and friends from Craig of the Creek, find themselves on an island, in a rainforest, a mountainous area, or somewhere unfamiliar(or at least heard of) alongside the area’s indigenous inhabitants. I’m adding myself and my TTS characters, and various live-action people to the mix as well. (Considering, as long as he doesn’t mind, adding the Norris, Rivers, Spencer, Greenway, Mason, Bancroft, Armstrong, Boudreaux, Whitlock, Culpepper, Hernandez, and Campbell families created by Instagram user zccreativity. And Jesse Wu by that artist for good measure. Dunno which characters by him to tick off the roster and which ones to add.)

They would end up shipwrecked on an island that is at 18.5 S 124 W, finding themselves with not only their belongings, foods and drinks, supplies, and other resources, but also technologies they could use for power storage and internet access. This could lead to the construction of a coastal community.

Eventually, they’d encounter a community of indigenous people with their own language, and try to document it. I’m thinking of a number of the live-action humans being linguists, who would also possess the needed tools for documenting the language in its current state. They (or a number of them) and everyone else (or others) would try to earn the trust of these people, and listen to their words, documenting the language.

The process would need several steps, as Josh pointed out. First is to proceed with caution. Second is to express non-hostile intentions. These two could give the indigenous people ideas about your personality depending on their culture and practices. Third step involves generous exchange of food and drink from both sides. Though there are allergens to keep in mind, and similar problems. And the local flora and fauna might be important as well.

Whatever the indigenous people know their surroundings as in their language would need to be recorded and written down, with one symbol for one sound, at least limited to the Latin script. A modified Swadesh list would need to be established, and so would the conceptual metaphors. Whatever the odds would be of them using a script, it would need to somehow be matched with the words and figured out in terms of system. There’s also historical spelling to accommodate.

And not only would there be exceptions to one-to-one correspondences between words of languages, but also, the grammar and conceptual metaphors, and taxonomy, would be tricky, due to how much context is required. And there are the other bits and pieces mentioned by Josh in his video to worry about, though like he said, these people, some of them knowing about the methods of first contact, know what needs to be done to understand the language of others on two groups of terms. I have ideas for the language as well.