I have some additional questions:
- I can't see the Crown Dependencies on the Structure of the British Empire - I'm assuming their status is roughly the same in TTL as in OTL, is that the case?
- Also, considering the not so minor differences between OFC New England and TFS New England, how would you compare them? Is OFC New England a more ideal and TFS New England a more dystopian version for you or maybe there's no specific difference between the two and they're just alternate versions from two timelines?
- Crown Dependencies, as we know them, don't
really exist. They are just a separate administrative region now with a local parliament and representation in Westminister.
- OFC New England is one that was bourne from the top down. TFS New England is one that was construction from the bottom up.
Pretty good American dialect here. On the other hand, I can barely understand what in the blue hell it says.
This isn’t English, it’s ✨Philadelphian✨ (named after a certain Revolution-era inhabitant of that city who created it as a phonetic writing system).
Indeed, Philadelphic (Filɋdelfik) is considered its own language now. The spelling reforms (including the changes offered by Benjamin Franklin), have a long and storied history in the United States, from well before the revolution. This is an overhaul of the old "American," which I admit was rather rushed, in place of a new script that was proposed at the time.
Interestingly, it looks like the Americans refer to the orthography as "Philidelphic," if my reading of it is correct, and that they have a version for Spanish as well. Do we know when the spelling reform was implemented?
Also, I just noticed the Lord Quincy plot line was foreshadowed in one of the little side boxes in the BBC article about Napoleon. Great stuff!
This is correct. The spelling reforms were implimented first in Philadelphia schools in the 1760s, which quickly became a model across the colonies, and then country. It was in the 1830s when, a desire to standardise school systems, the wildy successful "Philadelphia Model" was adopted.
I can barely read it through the special characters. I love it.
It seems like you've used Benjamin Franklin's alphabet, but with ꜵ for /ɔ:/, ɋ for /a:/, and ђ for /ð/. You've also added casing, although it's not quite consistent (you vary between S and Ʃ for the capital form of ʃ/s, which are different contextual forms of the same letter in Franklin's orthography), and it'd make sense to keep consistency between capitals of h and ђիⱨ.
Indeed, there are some modifications there. Some of the script I use to generate this is... lacking to say the least. I am attempting to work out the bugs in the software (The S and Ʃ issue has been fixed, I had a bug in the code).
There was
a previous AmeriNet post by
@CosmicAsh; it had a far more primitive, late-90s interface, and was mentioned to be an intranet that's entirely disconnected from the global Internet. Has that all been retconned, as the post was later removed?
Also, previous posts written in "American" (i.e. the
Louisianan Declaration of Independence) were also quite different (i.e. less divergent from standard English, and therefore easier to read) from this "Philadelphian" alphabet. Has this been retconned as well?
This layout can be understood to have been used in the 1990s, but is not the main one used today. This would have been the very early American intranet used only in the country. AmeriNet is a western hemispheric internet system, used by most of the countries.
Yes. They will be updated along the way to match the new changes.
I wonder what happened to the prominent "report terrorist incident" link from the OG AmeriNet?
Yet another incredible insight into the world of OFS, as always,
@CosmicAsh!
Thank you! This verbiage has been softened, but you can still report incidents using the AmeriNet interface.
It's also worth noting that per the Discord, AmeriNet is one of three major internets in the world of TFS, the other two being the British/Imperial internet (not yet specifically named by the timeline AFAIK) and a third major internet with its nexuses in Argentina and Russia. AmeriNet isn't just an intranet for the United States anymore; it can apparently be accessed throughout the Americas aside from the parts within the British Empire. Figured I might as well mention it since it's a pretty big change.
I believe this discussion may have been after this post was made, or was limited to #lore-development.
AmeriNet = North, South America
Internet = Imperial countries, most of Europe, most of Africa, some of North/South America
Vebsoyedineniye = Russian Empire
Tsūshin Nettowāku= Japan
(Some others as well, the development is ongoing as I research more).
I'd actually like to read the Philadelphian alphabet.
(I hope this is what you meant)
Bringing this up. If you don't mind, I might make ASCII variants for TTL British, American and Russian standards (I assume there'd be different encodings for each, given the fragmented nature of TTL's internets). A few questions to ask:
- Is punctuation different in TTL? Have any new punctuation marks been invented TTL (like sarcasm marks or rhetorical question marks) that do not exist OTL?
- Does Russian still have OTL's spelling reforms that eliminated іѵѣ and most instances of ъ, and added ё? Or have different reforms been passed?
- Punctuation remains the same.
- Russian spelling reforms are pending discussions with the lore development team
there should totally be a English -> Philadelfik translator thingy
I have one for internal use, I am not sure I can release it.
Do we know the mains electricity & AC power plugs and sockets used by countries of TTL?
Moreover, it would be interesting to know what major payment processing/ credit card networks (such as VISA, Mastercard, AmEx...) exist in TTL.
This is a post I've wanted to make for quiet some time!! Stay tuned...
Nice map! And I do wonder how easy (or difficult) it is for users from one regional 'Net to access another - is dedicated software (i.e.
VPNs or
Tor-esque browsers) or power user knowledge (i.e. how to configure network ports, IP addresses, proxies, etc.) needed, or is it more on the level of "Googling an online tutorial"?
The idea is just so
alien to OTL sensibilities - for all the talk of the Internet being increasingly partitioned between the global and Chinese networks, the firewalled Chinese internet is still very much part of the global system, having been built using the same foundational protocols (HTTP, SMTP, IMAP, IPv4/6, MAC, etc.). Global users can access Chinese sites just like any other website, and the reverse is true in China for non-censored foreign sites; even accessing censored sites
("jumping the Great Firewall") is quite straightforward with VPNs. Hell, even the North Koreans'
Kwangmyong intranet still uses IPv4, and their domestic
Red Star OS is just a cheap Linux fork.
What does it actually
mean for the Internet to be partitioned into three - a different set of basic protocols underlying each regional network? That would mean in order to be distributed globally, every browser, router, server and operating system would have to maintain compatibility with all three protocol stacks; as well as having converters to translate data transmissions using one stack's protocols to the other two. How much extra time, money and effort would this cost Internet service providers, IT corporations, hardware manufacturers, web developers and content creators in practice?
Interesting, considering that AmeriNet is noted to be "maintained by the Corporation of the Americas, a continental partnership from the United States to Argentina", and that the most-read AmeriNet article is "Hogan to meet Argentinian President". Does that mean Argentina is a hub for both AmeriNet and the Russian/Argentinian internet? And since Argentina is a Great Power and the Americas' strongest economy, does it have amicable relations with the United States, or at least a decent degree of influence over the Hermit Republic?
Argentina exists primarily on AmeriNet. The key difference here is one can understand the internet as being little "spheres" that do communicate with each other. There are different protocols developed in different countries, and make the backbone of that internet's overall structure. And you have rightfully pointed out the complexity and level of nightmare that this would bring - however this is merely how a much less interconnected world has undertaken its development. Separate systems grew independently from another, and severability from the wider networks became a positive, not a negative. A good analogy that someone on the discord server used, and which I agree with, is that one can imagine the internet in the world of TFS as a postal system. Inside your network, everything works pretty smoothly and fine. Once you attempt to do things outside of your network... things get tricker and more expensive. But it's still doable.
I would really like to learn more about how the US spiraled into newspeak totalitarianism
I would be hestitant to call it "Newspeak," when it is a phonetic alphabet that has gone through natural lingustic drift. As for it being totalitarian - I should have more on that soon.