Language
While primarily English, the Colonial language was written to include several fictional words that differentiated its culture from those of Earth, most notably time units and expletives. The words were roughly equivalent to their English counterparts, and the minor technical differences in meaning were suggestive to the viewer. Colonial distance and time units were incompletely explained, but appear to have been primarily in a decimal format.
- Time units included millicenton (approximately equivalent to one second), centon (minute), centar (hour), cycle (day), secton (week), quatron (unknown, perhaps 1/4 yahren), sectar (month), yahren (Colonial year), centuron (Colonial century).
- Distance units were metron (meter) and micron (second of time when used in a countdown, but also a distance unit, possibly a kilometer.)
- Expletives included "frack", also spelled "frak" (interjection), "felgercarb" (noun), and "golmonging", also spelled "gall-monging" (adjective).
- Other terms included daggit (a dog-like animal indigenous to one of the colonies), ducat (ticket), pyramid (card game), triad (a full-contact ball and goal game similar to basketball), and lupus (a wolf-like animal indigenous to another of the colonies).
- Figures of speech There were a number of these used in the series, such as "daggit dribble", a term used to condemn falsehood, and "daggit-meat", used as an expression of contempt.
Read more about this topic: Battlestar Galactica (1978 TV Series)
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“Language makes it possible for a child to incorporate his parents’ verbal prohibitions, to make them part of himself....We don’t speak of a conscience yet in the child who is just acquiring language, but we can see very clearly how language plays an indispensable role in the formation of conscience. In fact, the moral achievement of man, the whole complex of factors that go into the organization of conscience is very largely based upon language.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after having abused it for so long, you are stupefied by its innocence.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“I do not speak with any fondness but the language of coolest history, when I say that Boston commands attention as the town which was appointed in the destiny of nations to lead the civilization of North America.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)