Do ponies speak in horse or do you think they speak actual English?

>acknowledging EqG

For what purpose? It's easy enough to infer an answer with what we already know.

Ponies speak a synthetic language which is not inflected by grammatical gender but by grammatical species.

>>29251468
Why wouldn't he acknowledge the best part of MLP?

>>29251471
(you)

>>29251482
Thanks, pal I earned it for laying down the hard truth

If they are speaking their own language and what we hear is just a translation to english then there would be no english-specific puns or *perfectly* placed wordplay, since these very rarely survive translation.

They speak english or a language that has exactly the same rhymes, puns, wordplay possibilities, timing and mouth movement.

>>29251525

>being this literal

You probably believe that the Bible is the literal word of God too, you unimaginative, low-functioning autist.

>>29251555
Quite the opposite. Figurative bullshit of man. ^:)

>>29251558

Then why be constrained by taking what you see and hear as the literal truth? The episodes need not have happened the way they were presented to you.

>>29251564
Because if we do not assume this then *literally* everything is possible and you simply can not make any general statements. It just defeats the purpose of this thread, so we assume this implicitly.

>>29251564
If they're is a possibility that things are different than presented, then it is entirely possible to have things as presented.

>>29251376
They speak with their bodies

>>29251622
They say "Hug me."

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>>29251376
>Do people speak in monkey or do you think they speak actual English?

>>29251571

I don't think that's true. I think that, like mathematics, it matters what you hold as axiomatically true. You can then work from there.

>>29251589

So you like the way the story is going? You wouldn't change a thing? Everything makes wonderful sense in Equestria today, and everything will continue to make sense in the future?

>>29251672
Well if you do not take what is in the episodes/canon as axioms then what will you use to test your general statements about fim? You simply can not discuss in a void. Or rather you can, but since there is no way of evaluating statements they all default to "undefined". Defeats the purpose.

>>29251376
Everywhere that matters speaks English, so yeah ponies speak the same language as us. They probably just call it Equestrian, since there's no England to name the language after, and speak in slightly different horse-isms than plain English.

>>29251686

Yes you can. It happens all the time in philosophy.

>>29251754
Read with understanding. Do not assume everyone around you is stupid.
>Or rather you can, but since there is no way of evaluating statements they all default to "undefined". Defeats the purpose.

It is like arguing with someone who believes to be tormented by Evil Demon, or someone who believes in solipsism. If no statement can be disproven then discussion has no purpose, maybe except fun or intellectual exercise. It happens all the time in philosophy.

>>29251667
Isn't English a monkey language?

>>29251767
>If no statement can be disproven then discussion has no purpose, maybe except fun or intellectual exercise.

What the everloving fuck are you even doing here, if not having >fun or intellectually masturbating everywhere? Into which alternate reality did I phase where 4chan is useful?

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>>29251781
>Into which alternate reality did I phase where 4chan is useful?
This is Kek's world of chaotic nonsense now that we're on the Donald Trump timeline.

>>29251791

Don't remind me desu

>>29251800
About which part? All this shit is pretty great.

>>29251813

"Here lies Humanity. Instead of seeking out Equestria, they memed themselves to death."

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>>29251839
We were never going to find Equestria, you fool. We had to work with what we had. We may have memed ourselves to death, but at least we went out with a bang instead of slowly dying off while we searched for a delusional fantasy.

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>>29251376
It's a cartoon for little girls

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>>29251376
Let's just go with canon instead, and ignore everything else. Ok? It wouldn't make a whole lot of sense to discuss pony behavior from the perspective of a fanfic either.


Obviously, we can't take anything the ponies say as evidence, what we CAN do is look at their writing, and work with the assumption that pony written language behaves similarly to their spoken language.

This is Pinkie Pie's birthday cake from back in S1.

The first 4 letters are clearly "Happ", and the second word has what looks like a clear-cut "h" in the middle.
The rest is more or less intelligible.
Now, if you really squint, it COULD say:
>Happy Birthday
>Pinkamena Pie

Note that in Equestrian, "Pinkamena" and "Pie" don't start with the same letter even though they're pronounced almost the same and use the same letter in English. This COULD indicate their written language is similar but not identical to English.
Bad example, though, since it's text on a poorly written cake and we can't know for absolute certain what it says.

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>>29252034

Here's Spike's Dragon Card.

I think it's fair to assume this asset was made and then mirrored to fit the scene composition better, if you DON'T share that assumption, then any correlation between English and Equestrian written language is coincidental, and it's very likely their spoken language follows suit.

But let's go on, with the aforementioned assumption.
Mirror it, squint a bit, and it's clearly meant to say:
>Spike
>Dragon
>Card

Spike isn't spelt the same in Equestrian, the beginning is very similar, and there's something that could be a "k".
There's a clear "D" in Dragon and a "C" in Card, but the rest is English-ish but not a match.
We're beginning to see a pattern.

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>>29252054

Last example, the most clear-cut one.

Daring Do and the Ring of Destiny. It's in a stylized but printed font, and very readable Equestrian.

>DARING DO
>and the
>RING of DESTINY

Many of the Equestrian capital letters are very similar to our normal Latin ones, particularly D, R, N, G and O.
Meanwhile, A, I, T and Y are drastically dissimilar.
The lowercase letters in "and the" and "of" are much further off. Interestingly, despite being printed on a book they look fairly similar to both what's printed on the cake and what Spike wrote, so perhaps the previous examples don't suffer from bad handwriting THAT much.

All in all though, we can safely conclude that while the Equestrian written language shares many similarities with modern English, it is not the same. The same is most likely true for their spoken language.

> The words "quill", "quince", "quesadilla", etc. are similar.
> The words "germ" and "worm" sound similar enough to be confused for each other.
> They call fried potato slices "chips", or at least use the same word for them and chocolate chips.

If it isn't American English, it's a nearly-identical language.

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>>29252086

More Equestrian writing, this one completely intelligible.

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>>29252093

Curiously, it seems at least twp other form of writing exists in parallel in Equestria. Both VERY dissimilar to the Latin alphabet and not often used.

Simplified Pony, perhaps?

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>>29252118

>>29251376
My personal head cannon is they speak another language that would be easier on horse mouths. I like to imagine their language being almost musical, like it has a sort of melody undertone. I like to think it sounds really beautiful.

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The spacing and repetition of the symbols strongly suggest it's written text (plus the fact it's on a flier).

But like the one in >>29252118 and >>29252124 there's just not enough data to try and make any sort of sense out of it.

Maybe it's something they use specifically for posters, dirty areas, workplaces and the like? Simplified symbols and hard lines like these would be a lot easier to read and decipher after they've been half-dissolved by sun and rain and storm than the common Equestrian alphabet.

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>>29252140
I'd wager it's an alphabet used in academic contexts, since it's also in what seems to be some sort of encyclopedia.

>>29252168

Good catch, didn't think of that book.

>>29252170
It could also be a simplified alphabet intended for foals; the introductory tone and large print of the encyclopedia, as well as the prominent picture and brightly colored paragraph backgrounds, could suggest it's a book on Equestrian legends intended for a younger demographic.

>>29252118
They definitely use the standard Latin alphabet as well. "WELCOME PRINCESS CELEST" for example.

>>29252199

Hard to say, Swarm of the Century is early S1, and a lot of things changed since then.
Color-identifier and visuals for unicorn magic, Big McIntosh's cutie mark, etc.

>>29252168 is also very early S1 though, so eh. Could make the argument either way.

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Yet another style, Foal Free Press.

Maybe this is what you get when you combine the "common" >>2925208 style with the "smudge-resistant" >>29252118 ?

>>29251779
Ha! Vy gavarite pa rUsski?

>>29251880
Have you already forgot where we are?

>>29251880
Yes and...?

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>>29252232
It's been used at least as late as Season 3.

>>29251376
Their lips make the same movements and stops used to pronounce vowels and consonants of the English language, so yes, they speak English.

>>29252140
>>29252168
I heard a theory that this is actually a type of hieroglyph that isn't commonly used in modern Equestria. Similarly to how Latin is used in modern day Academia.

Of course it's confusing why then it would be used on a talent show poster but we today, even though we don't speak Latin, like to use roman numerals in place of arabic numerals in certain contexts. Maybe something similar is happening here. Maybe old Equestrian hieroglyphs are considered more artistic and that's why they would use them on a flier for a talent show.

>>29252310
So do Klingons yet we're expected believe they don't speak English and it's only because of universal translators we understand them.

Any movement or sound related to the mouth is unreliable and should be discarded in this discussion.

>>29252273
da, naxui idi

>>29252333
There only seem to be ten symbols in that alphabet (pony, olive, horn, horseshoe, spiral, unicorn head, star, lightning bolt, crescent moon, and rainbow), so I'm leaning towards the idea that it's a simplified alphabet for foals to learn with.

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>>29251376
They speak American: the universal language.

>>29252398
I don't really see the logic in having an alphabet designed specifically for foals. Wouldn't that kinda mess up their learning process by having them basically learning two different alphabets? They aren't even that similar.

Hieroglyphs makes more sense to me. The low number of symbols can be explained with it being a modern simplified version.

>>29252502
There could be a connection to the normal alphabet we're not seeing, like how children are often taught capital letters first, or how children learn Hebrew with the vowel markers before they learn to infer what the vowels are.

Another possibility that just came to mind is that it could be a simplified alphabet used for printing, since their typewriters only have three keys.

I always imagined it as Equestria having different ways of writing the same language. Perhaps each tribe developed their own calligraphy, which is why there are instances of symbols like horseshoes and clovers being used, while other times it's just scribbles and almost-english. My headcanon is that the English we use is the Equestrian cursive, in that it is seen as fancy and used for, say welcoming princess celest.

>>29252540
Maybe, your theories are good but I have a hard time accepting them simply because the two alphabets seem to different.

Your examples would imply the latter alphabet is a simplified version of the former but at least the they should look somewhat similar right? Inventing a whole new alphabet for these tasks seems needlessly complex.

Maybe it's a mix of our theories? It was a language once but latter got simplified and ended up being used in more niche situations (teaching, typewriting)?

>>29252579
If that's the case, it could be that the mangled-looking almost-English we see on, for instance, Pinkie's birthday cake, is the standard Equestrian writing system, probably designed to be easier to write with your mouth. More formal applications such as an old map or welcoming Princess Celestia use the more rigid, proper-looking variants of the glyphs.

>>29252579
>>29252607
This actually makes a lot of sense. Damn.

>>29252579
I can see how this would evolve. When the tribes were unified they started developing a common language but each tribe kept their own writing systems so all of them survived in some form.

>>29252588
Maybe typewriters were invented a long time ago in Equestria (or possibly stolen from a mirror universe by Celestia and Starswirl), so they use an old writing system. It's stuck around as a form of shorthand for backwards-compatibility and because it can be typed with the two large keys pony hooves require.

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>>29252579
>>29252707

I like this.

Now, can we figure out which tribe wrote what?

The Ancient Greek-inspired warrior-tribe, the pegasi, probably contributed the hard, straight lines. Pic related.

Would earth ponies or unicorns use swirling cursive? Makes sense for an earth pony holding a pencil to write that way with their mouth, but it makes just as much sense for a unicorn.

And what about the hieroglyphs? Given their large, filled-in color and limited variation I'm guessing they were ALWAYS meant to be stamped on, rather than an inkwell and a pencil for writing you'd have an ink platter and 10 carved stamps. This is nice if you're an Earth Pony and lack magic, stamping letter after letter is probably easier than writing by mouth. But it's not bad if you're a telekinetic unicorn either, a trained scribe could coordinate all 10 stamps in the air at once (similar to Rarity and her needles and scissors) and achieve writing speeds almost on par with a typewriter.

>>29252540
>>29252733

Equestrian typewriters write this >>29252247, the typewriters are specifically used to write the Foal Free Press, and I don't think we've ever seen them used for writing anything else.

>>29251376
Probably not - the biggest argument is using idioms with "hand" (multiple episodes) while claiming no knowledge of what a "hand" is (end of EQG1). Likewise, some exotic phrases (everypony) could be added simply to keep the dialogue sounds more authentic.

>EQG not canon argument
It was said multiple times that even comics are canon unless they directly oppose the show's canon.

>Lip sync argument
Bullshit - lip movement doesn't have to sync with spoken word perfectly, or dubbing would be impossible. When dubbed, the audio is adjusted so that visemes match to their respective phonemes roughly - however, pacing is more important than viseme by viseme matching. Human mind can fill in a lot of blanks and ignore a lot of details it doesn't want to see.

>Written language
A different beast entirely. There is a possibility of localization, which would explain inconsistent script. Hieroglyphs from Twi's book could be the authentic text while things like newpaper titles would be adjusted to be more suitable for English-speaking audience. Still, multiple forms of writing for different races/classes/contexts sound plausible - unicorns would probably have distinct, complex writing thanks to their telekinesis. Earth ponies would likely write using hooves, horseshoes in various configurations, and/or marks made by simple instruments like sticks. This could be formalized into something similar to what Twilight has in her book.

>Typewriters
Two input keys would imply characters are written as the composite result of a binary input. With marks in Twilight's books, pony "unicode" could have as few as four bits per single character.

>>29252948
>It was said multiple times that even comics are canon unless they directly oppose the show's canon.
sauce

>>29252991
Okay, that might be dubious, but I think I read it in some interviews on "how canon IDW comics are" a while ago.

Still doesn't make EQG any less canon than Slice of Life.

Based on this thread I've come to the conclusion that the Equestrian language is even more fucked in the head than Japanese. That's all I can really say for sure though. I used to think it would be cool to have to learn Equestrian or whatever. Not anymore.

>>29253035
So no sauce?

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>>29253114
Closest I could find on short notice:

>>29252838
I highly doubt that they type out the paper's name; that'd be put together by a graphic designer, and the "EXCLUSIVE!" is clearly precomposed word art.

member when Apple Bloom spoke in fancy?

autism

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There's this: letters clear and easy to see. It has a slight similarity to the alphabets of Semitic languages in my eyes; and I see a few a few marks which could possibly be diacritical (?).

It'd be interesting if we could determine if ponies write from left to right or right to left. Any ideas?

>>29253739
Like fuck, whatever dude. It's just a cartoon.

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Honestly, I think ponies are supposed to speak a goofy made-up language and The few times they use English is just a blooper.

>>29253739
the I's don't match

>>29251376
>a world that isn't Earth
>a place that certainly hásn't had the history of the English language
Only the most autistic could actually come close to believing that any fictional franchise unrelated to the real Earth could even have any of Earth languages.

tl;dr - Of course and naturally not.

>>29253968
>proof of english as canon
>use headcanon anyway

>>29251468
What is wrong with acknowledging EqG? It's a more gray area but there's also those tweets by Meghan.
I see nothing wrong with bringing it up. At the least it tell us that the ponies language may sound more human-like than horse-like. And if you're into EqG it brings up the interesting tidbit that both the EqG world and Equestria may share the same language and writing.

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Why do Diamond dogs speak in a broken version of 'Equestrian' and act the most feral and animal like when no other race does this?

Does this imply they have their own language and had to make an effort to learn pony-speak? Can they speak 'canine' and communicate with Timerwolves and shit?

>>29255296
Seems like it.
Broken English isn't the same for every speaker. For example, Asian will use infinitives, Slavs will omit articles, and Canadians will eh.

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>>29255296
They are goblins

>>29255158
I think this is literally the only time they've writen in plain English. In every other instans they use a different script.

>>29252394
E,slish ,hohol ebani ,suda podoshel!

>>29251376
They speak in horse and the show just translates it
That's why they still sometimes whinny and such, they're actually swearing

>>29256822
>"Mr. Owl, how many appearances does it take in the show to become canon?"
>"Just one."

>>29257071
By your own standard, all other scripts shown are just as canon, perhaps even more so since most of those scripts have been shown multiple times.

Daily reminder that they have referenced an actual real language on the show, French.

Bump for interest.

I'm sorry to say this but
Staffs just don't care. It's all random

>>29257190
I don't remember this, unless you mean AB sacre bluming.
That said, there's also Zecora - in her first episode she shouts something that definitely is different from ponespeak.

>>29257644
Yeah, I think that's it. From the Wiki:
>Apple Bloom: Oh no! Sacrebleu! Plus de marques de cutie! [gasp] Qu'est-ce c'est?! Je parle français?! (Oh no! Darn it! More cutie marks! [gasp] What's this?! I speak French?!)
AJ calls it Fancy.

>>29253739
>>29254029

"E" doesn't match either.

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>>29253739
I did a quick mock up in Paint trying to make it more readable.

>>29253739
Someone on derpibooru deciphered the writing and found some more in the background.

>>29257827

And? What does it say?

>>29257827
Link it

>>29257190
And Spanish.

>>29257854
"U R A FAG"

>>29251376

>>29251376
No. Ponis don't speak English just like people in Middle-Earth or other citious setting don't speak human languages. Especialy when there are no humans.

Their language, the pony language, would most probably have some focus on whther someone is a pony or not. Very likely they'd have different words depending on the rae of the user, like how sailors have another speak from those living in the woods.

>>29257908
Where