jabbascript has me back down the painful rabbit hole of Huttese used across different Star Wars media, but this time it's more interesting bc i'm now viewing it as sort of a family of pidgins, both in-universe and irl bc each book/show's writers seem to be reinventing it based on previous Huttese dialog, creating a sort of pidgin in the process.
So like. in the original trilogy, Huttese is mostly just whatever mixing up of Quechua sounds Ben Burtt thought sounded good, not much analyzable structure except a few words. But then in subsequent Star Wars media, they were trying to find structure in all that, extracting what words they could and going from there. And as that goes on it compounds with each later piece of writing using Huttese drawing from the previous ones. But there's enough different between the different iterations of it that it makes sense to view each of them as sort of a separate dialect of a pidgin/creole derived from Basic (English) influence + acrolect-Huttese (the nonsense Jabba says). A lot of the reuse and semantic broadening of specific lexemes follows similar patterns to pidgins too.
Some examples of specific Huttese words that gradually became established and reused in subsequent media:
- /nud tʃa/: originally said by Bib Fortuna in Return of the Jedi after C-3PO tells him their instructions are to deliver the message to Jabba himself. It's glossed as "forward march" by Ben Burtt in the Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide. In Galactic Battlegrounds it's used to mean "war", which it is also used for later on in The Clone Wars. It's also used more like its original usage by Bib in The Mandalorian.
- /stuka/: I think originally used in the game Episode I Racer, unless that took it from some previous nonsense. In that game, it's used for both "see" and "look"; based on that, it later is used in "Stuka Crispo", given as the Huttese for "Death Watch" (with "crispo" coming from Jabba's dialog in A New Hope, interpreted as being the word corresponding to "fry" in "why did you fry poor Greedo?")
- /tʃɛsko/: used in The Phantom Menace by Anakin in /tʃɛsko sɛbulba/ "careful, Sebulba"; later used with the same meaning in The Book of Boba Fett in the sentence /uŋki tʃɛsko muriʃani/ glossed as "sleep lightly, bounty hunter", with /uŋki/ presumably the same as winkee "to sleep" from the Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide, and murishani for "bounty hunter" being used in a lot of media, not sure where it originally showed up but supposedly it's said in the movies even tho it doesn't quite sound like it / that might be a later reinterpretation.