Why do kerbals speak in gibberish but write in English?

[Derpie]

think about it!

[DuckZero]

It's not gibberish. It's backwards Spanish.

[Derpie]

backwards Spanish is gibberish, can you interpret it?

[F1refly]

They speak? I've never heard it, maybe I'm missing a sound module?

[Derpie]

Its in the trailers

[JonoRig]

Maybe their pronunciations are just different, but the writing is the same (I'm thinking about how the Welsh pronounce their words when it just looks like gibberish...) Or its conveniently translated so most people can understand it

[Fredonia]

The TARDIS translation matrix had a hiccup. It worked on the writing, but not speech. You know how those old type 40s are...

[Crusher8000]

It's not english, it's kerbish but by coincidence it's the same language on paper.

[SkyRender]

Perhaps Kerbals have a healthy stock of babelfish living in their oceans. When they inevitably intercepted some old episodes of I Love Lucy coming across the interstellar medium while having a fish in their ear (it's more likely than you think with Kerbals), they were immediately enamored and developed the ability to decode the video and audio signals. Kerbals never had a written language before that, having not needed one, but seeing the old serials changed all that. Where do you think they learned rocket science, despite having literally nothing else on their planet? Anyway, they write in English because English was the first written language they ever encountered.

Is that sufficiently ridiculous and convoluted for you?

[AstronautGeologist]

Skyrender lol

[MarkusA380]

Haha never thought about that!

But I am sure it's because of the pronounciation. Maybe they found a lexicon on a hill when they were in the stone age (They did rocketscience yet, anyway) that fell through a wormhole from earth... Or the kerbals are the next genration of humans, far in the future. Both theories would show why there is a new pronounciation but the old writing...

[KSK]

Awards Skyrender a modified Rory for 'the most gratuitous yet amusing convoluted explanation on a KSP forum thread'.

[BubbaWilkins]

Get the Chatterer mod, quite entertaining to hear Kerbals talk to each other over the radio.

[sporkafife]

All of these explanations are just preposterous!!!! It's obvious what's happening! The Kerbal language is gibberish to us. And they just happen use strikingly similar characters to our Arabic alphabet, these letters are however pronounced entirely differently to how we would pronounce them. And to add another extreme level of coincidence, the combination of their gibberish language and their ludicrous pronunciation of an alphabet that is (by another hilarious coincidence!) identical to ours in written form, we end up with a language that sounds so different to ours, but is written down identically to modern human English

[zekes]

its not gibberish its backwards Spanish (From the mouths of the Dev).

[Spaceisbeautifulul]

OR! They have awesome accents.