Roshan Variant English
RoVE is my dialect of English, perhaps just an idiolect. It is meant to interoperate with English where it can with some differences. This page is meant to be descriptive, not prescriptive.
Loan Words[edit]
Loan words from foreign languages are pronounced as they are in that language. Most RoVE speakers would consider you pretentious if you did not do so.
Pronoun Gender[edit]
Just like English moved on from most other European languages by removing noun gender, RoVE moves on from English by removing pronoun gender. Current candidate replacement for pronouns is ne/nim. When speaking English, RoVE speakers will usually go along with whatever pronoun people prefer, but strictly RoVE has no gendered pronouns.
Punctuation[edit]
RoVE uses the same punctuation as English for the most part, but there are a few exceptions
Embedded Punctuation Marks[edit]
Statements quoting other statements are "double-punctuated", i.e. if your sentence ends with a quotation, you both punctuate your sentence and the quoted text. As an example, consider the following text:
Turning to me, John asked, "Did you eat the cake?".
So the statement articulating what the other person said is closed with the full-stop and the question is closed with the question mark. RoVE does not permit terminal punctuation to be absorbed or to play the role syntactically closing the enclosing sentence.
Use-Mention Distinction[edit]
RoVE has a strong use-mention distinction. People who speak RoVE will type words in quotes usually to talk about the reference rather than the referent.
Which-Eth[edit]
In order to identify the index of a specific element in a list, RoVE permits asking the question as "which-eth". e.g. "Which-eth President was Donald Trump?" has the answer "The 45th".
Vocabulary[edit]
RoVE shares most of English's vocabulary. However there are some modifications:
Literally[edit]
The word 'literally' may be used to mean 'figuratively' in RoVE. In fact, no RoVE speaker has ever failed to use this word unification.
Retard[edit]
The word "retard" etc. are acceptable to refer to people who are acting stupid. It is not considered idiomatic to describe intellectually-impaired individuals in this manner.
