Let’s make a language, part 18a: Geography (Intro)

The world is a very big place, and it contains a great many things. Even before you start counting those that are living—from plants and animals down to microbes—you can find a need for hundreds or thousands of words. So that’s what we’ll do in this entry. We’ll look at the natural world, but we’ll avoid talking about its flora and fauna for the moment. Instead, the focus will be on what we might call the natural geography. The lay of the land, if you will.

The world itself

For us, “world” is virtually synonymous with “earth” and “planet”. But that’s an artifact of our high-tech society. In older days, these concepts were pretty separate. The earth was the surface, the ground—the terra firma. Planets were wandering stars in the sky, so named because they seemed to change their positions from night to night, relative to the “fixed” background stars. And the world was everything that could be observed, closer to what we might call the “universe” or “cosmos”.

Within this definition of the world, many cultures (and thus languages) create a three-way distinction between the earth, sea, and sky. Earth is solid, dry land, where people live and work and farm and hunt. Sea is the open water, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, but not necessarily rivers and lakes; it’s the place where man cannot live. And the sky is the vast dome above, home of the sun, moon, and stars, and often whatever deity or deities the speakers worship. In pre-flight cultures, it tends to have dreamlike connotations, due to its effective inaccessibility. People can visit the sea, even if they can’t stay there, but the sky is always out of our reach.

Here, the details of your speakers’ world come into play. If they’re on Earth, then they’ll probably follow this terrestrial model to some extent. Aliens, however, will tailor their language to their surroundings. A world without a large moon like ours likely won’t have a word for “moon”; ancient Martians, for instance, might consider Phobos and Deimos nothing more than faster planets. Those aliens lucky enough to have multiple moons, on the other hand, will develop a larger vocabulary for them. The same goes for other astronomical phenomena, from the sun to the galaxy.

Land and sea

Descending to that part of the world we can reach, we find a bounty of potential words. There’s flat land, in the form of plains and valleys and fields. More rugged are the hills and mountains, distinguished with separate words in many languages; hills are really not much more than small mountains, but few languages conflate the two. Abundant plant life can create forests or, in some places, jungles, and a culture adapted to either of these areas will likely make far finer distinctions than we do. On the opposite end are the dry deserts, which aren’t necessarily hot (the Gobi is a cold desert, as is Antarctica). These don’t seem truly hospitable for life, but desert cultures exist all across the globe, from the Bedouins of the Middle East to the natives of the American Southwest, but they’ll always seek out sources of water.

Fresh water is most evident in two forms. We have the static lakes and the moving rivers as the most generic descriptors, but they’re far from all there is. Ponds are small lakes, for example, and swamps are a bit like a combination of lake and land. Rivers, owing to their huge importance for travel in past ages, get a sizable list: streams, creeks, brooks, and so on. All of these have slightly different meanings, but those can vary between dialects: what I call a creek, someone in another state may deem a brook. And the shades of meaning don’t cross language barriers, either, but a culture depending on moving bodies of water will tend to come up with quite a few words describing different kinds of them.

In another of the grand cycles of life, fresh water spills into the seas. Now, English has two words for salty bodies of water, “sea” and “ocean”, but that doesn’t mean they’re two separate things. Many languages have only one word covering both, and that’s fine. Besides, a landlocked language won’t really need to spend two valuable words on something that might as well not exist.

In addition to the broad range of terrain, terms also exist for smaller features. Caves, beaches, waterfalls, islands, and cliffs are just some of the things we name. Each one tends to be distinctive, in that speakers of a language have a set image in their minds of the “ideal” cave or bluff or whatever. That ideal will be different for different people, of course, but few would, for instance, think of the fjords of Norway when imagining a beach.

Talking about the weather

The earth and sea are, for the most part, unchanging. Scientifically, we know that’s not the case, but it’s close enough for linguistic purposes. The weather, however, is anything but static. (Don’t like the weather in {insert place name here}? Wait five minutes.) Languages have lots of ways to talk about the weather, and not just so that speakers will have a default topic for conversation.

Clouds are the most visible sign of a change in weather, but the wind can also tell you what’s to come. And for reasons that are probably obvious, there seems to be a trend: the worse the weather, the more ways a language has to talk about it. We can have a rain shower, a drizzle, maybe some sprinkles, or the far more terrible torrent, deluge, or flood. Thunder, lightning, snow (in places that have it), and more also get in on the weather words. In some locales, you can add in the tornado (or whirlwind) and hurricane to that list.

Culture and geography

Hurricane is a good example of geographical borrowing. It refers to a storm that can only form in the tropics, generally moving westward. That’s why the Spanish had to borrow a name from Caribbean natives—it was something they never really knew. True, hurricanes can strike Spain. Hurricane Vince made landfall in 2005, but 2005 was a weird year for weather all around, and there’s no real evidence that medieval and Renaissance Spaniards had ever seen a hurricane.

And that’s an important point for conlangers. Speakers of languages don’t exist in a vacuum, but few languages ever achieve the size of English or Spanish. Most are more limited in area, and their vocabulary will reflect that. We’ll see it more in future parts looking at flora and fauna, but it’s easy to illustrate in geography, too, as the hurricane example shows.

People living in a land that doesn’t have some geographical or meteorological feature likely won’t have a native word for it. The Spanish didn’t have a word for a hurricane. England never experienced a seasonal change in prevailing winds, so English had to borrow the word monsoon. Europe doesn’t have a lot of tectonic activity, but Japan does, so they’re the ones that came up with tsunami. The fjords of Scandinavia are defining features, but ones specific to that region, so we use the local name for them.

Conversely, those things a culture experiences more often will gain the focus of its wordsmiths. It says something about the English speaker’s native climate that there are so many ways to describe rain. Eskimo words for “snow” are a running linguistic joke, but there’s a kernel of truth in there. And English’s history had plenty of snow, otherwise we wouldn’t have flurries, flakes, and blizzards.

Time is also a factor in which lexical elements a language will have. Some finer distinctions require a certain level of scientific advancement. The cloud types—cumulus, nimbus, cirrus, etc.—were only really named two centuries ago, and they used terms borrowed from Latin. That doesn’t mean no one noticed the difference between puffy clouds and the grim deck of a nimbostratus before 1800, just that there was never a concerted effort to adopt fixed names for them. The same can be said for most other classification schemes.

Weather verbs

Finally, the weather deserves a second look, because it’s the reason for a very special set of verbs. In English, we might say, “It’s raining.” Other languages use an impersonal verb in this situation, with no explicit subject. (Our example conlang Ardari uses a concord marker of -y in this case.) For whatever reason, weather verbs are some of the most likely to appear in a form like this.

Perhaps it’s because the weather is beyond anyone’s control. It’s a force of nature. There’s no subject making it rain. It’s just there. But it’s one more little thing to consider. How does your conlang talk about the weather? You need to know, because how else are you going to start a conversation with a stranger?

On alliteration and assonance

When most people think about verse, they tend to think of rhyme first and foremost. Understandable, since that’s the defining quality of so much poetry. But there’s a whole other side of the word to explore, a front-end counterpart to the back-end rhyme.

Alliteration

Alliteration is the repetition of a sound at the beginning of a word, a mirror image to rhyming. It’s not quite as obvious these days, as rhyme and rhythm have won our hearts and minds, but it has an illustrious history. Some of the earliest Anglo-Saxon verse was composed using alliteration, as were epics from around the Western world. Classics such as “The Raven” and “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” have sections of alliterative verse, as do children’s nursery rhymes. Peter Piper probably needed something to catch the spit from all those P sounds. And who can forget all those old cartoons with hilariously alliterative newspaper headlines? Those were a thing, and they still are in places.

Echoes of alliteration are all around us. Like rhyme, the reason borders on the psychological. In oration, the beginning of the word tends to be more forceful than the end, more evocative. So punctuating your point with purpose (see what I did there?) helps to get your message stuck in the minds of your listeners. They can “latch on” to the repetition. Wikipedia’s article on alliteration uses King’s “I Have a Dream” speech as an example: “not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Notice how the hard K sounds beginning each of the “core” words grab your attention.

To be alliterative, you don’t have to use the same sound at the beginning of every word. The rules of English simply can’t accommodate that. (Newspapers cheated by removing extraneous words such as “a” and “the”.) It’s the content words that are most important, especially the adjectives and nouns. However, alliteration tends to be stricter than rhyme in what’s considered the “same” sound. Voicing differences change the quality of the sound, so they’re out. Clusters are in the same boat. On the other hand, sometimes an unstressed syllable (like un- or a-) can be ignored for the purposes of alliteration.

Assonance

Alliteration is concerned with consonant sounds. (I did it again!) Assonance is different; it’s all about the vowels. What’s more, it’s not limited to the beginnings of words. Rather, it’s a vowel sound repeated throughout a phrase or line of verse. Vowel rhyming can be considered a form of assonance, but it’s so much more than that.

Assonance pops up everywhere there are vowels, which means everywhere. It’s very well suited to small utterances, such as a single line of a song or a proverb. As with alliteration, it’s not an absolute requirement for all the vowels to be the same, but those that are need to be essentially identical. And it’s the content words that are most important. Schwas, ineffectual as they are, don’t even appear on the radar; a and the aren’t going to mess up assonance. But any other vowel is fair game, in English or whatever language you’re using.

In conlangs

Alliteration and assonance are perfectly usable in any context, and they can be made to fit any language. They might not be quite as permissive as rhyme, but they can have a greater lyrical effect when used properly. (And sparingly. Don’t overdo it.)

These literary devices work best in languages with patterns of stress. That stress can be fixed, but that narrows your options slightly. Inflectional languages with fixed final stress are probably the worst for alliteration, while initial stress gives the most “punch”. For assonance, it’s not so vital, but you want to make sure your vowels aren’t being forced to a fit a pattern.

Both alliteration and assonance are easiest to accomplish in languages with smaller phonemic inventories. That shouldn’t be surprising. It’s far less work to find two words that both begin with a P if your only other options are B, D, K, and S. With these smaller sound sets (are you kidding me?), you can even create more complex styles of alliterative verse. Imagine a CV-type language with interwoven alliteration patterns, where the first and third words of a line start with one sound, while the second and fourth begin with a different one.

The other end of the spectrum holds English and most European languages, and it’s less amenable. You need lots of words, or you’ll have to get some help from stress and syllabics. That’s how we can have alliterative English: by ignoring those tiny, unstressed prefixes that pop up everywhere. It’s possible to make it work, but you have to try harder. But trying is what this is all about.

Summer Reading List 2016: halfway home

We’re halfway through the official summer, about two-thirds of the way done with the unofficial season we’re using for our Summer Reading List. I don’t know about you, but I’ve got two out of three.

Fiction

  • Title: Shadows of Self
  • Author: Brandon Sanderson
  • Genre: Fantasy
  • Year: 2015

This is the fifth book in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series, the second of the second trilogy. It’s a pretty good one, though I feel it’s a bit weaker than some of the previous four. Compared to its predecessor, The Alloy of Law, it’s a bit lighter on the action, but far heavier on the worldbuilding. That’s fine by me. If you haven’t noticed, I love worldbuilding, and Sanderson is one of the best there is when it comes to it. I’ll definitely give this one high marks, and I can’t wait to read the trilogy’s finale, The Bands of Mourning. (It’s already out, by the way.)

Nonfiction

  • Title: A Million Years in a Day: A Curious History of Everyday Life
  • Author: Greg Jenner
  • Genre: History
  • Year: 2016

I found this one not too long ago (somewhere…), and I’m glad I did. It’s a fun look back through the history of everyday things and activities, following and relating to one modern man’s Saturday. I love history, and I especially love those smaller, less popular bits of it. History is not all about wars and religion and politics and race. It’s about people living their lives, and those lives never really change that much. And that’s the message of this book. Definitely worth a look, especially from a worldbuilding perspective. (Funny how that works out, huh?)

And one more…

I haven’t decided what the final book on the list will be, but I’ve got another month, so I should be okay. I hope you’re playing along at home, and that you’re having fun doing it.

Let’s make a language, part 17c: The body (Ardari)

Ardari, like Isian, is a human language. That makes our lives easier, because we don’t have to worry about alien anatomy, and that’s a big help with Ardari. The phonology and grammar are enough trouble by themselves!

The body

The Ardari body, or apsa, has seven main sections, and that’s a bit of a cross between physiology and philosophy. But that’s how they see it, so who are we to argue?

The first is the chäf “head”. That’s where the mouth (mim) is, so we need it to eat (tum-) and drink (kabus-). The head also has our zhajëlad “hair”, another important part of being human…unless you’re bald.

The head also physically contains the sense organs, but Ardari counts them as part of the brain, sènga. The agya “eye” lets us see (ivit-). To smell (aws-), we use the khun “nose”. The mèka “ear” is how we hear (ablon-). In addition to helping us eat, one part of the mouth, the lèta “tongue”, is used to taste (aty-). Touching (tejv-) is perceived by the brain, too, though the skin (prall) covers the entire body.

The head connects via the ghaf “neck” to the next part of the body: the chest, or ghall. It contains a number of important bones (singular: oqa) and muscles (singular: zuna).

But the chest’s most vital purpose is housing another section of the body: the rocha, or “heart”. The heart, to Ardari speakers, controls the chonga “blood”, one of the essences of life.

Sticking out of either side of the upper body is a kyem “arm”. Bending at the krin “elbow”, it ends at a hand, or kyur. Five fingers (singular: inda) are on that hand, one of which is the special kyu “thumb”.

Farther down the body is the lubrall, the abdomen. It has quite a few interesting bits, but the most pertinent for this post are the legs (singular: khära). Like arms, these have a bending joint, the knee or kubya. And at the end of each is one allga “foot”, complete with five toes (singular: alyinda). Put together, they’re how we walk (brin-).

Bodily functions

People live (derva-) and die (lo-). They sleep (rhèch-) and wake (äske-). And they do so much more.

Lovers will kiss (alym-) and perhaps dance (tatyer-), friends will laugh (jejs-) and smile (miwe-). Those who are sad can cry (ajn-), but someone will often be there to hold (yfily-) them. And that’s only a taste (atyëndasö) of what’s out there.

Word list

As with Isian, this is a larger list of words that contains those mentioned in this post and a number of others created for this topic.

Body parts
  • abdomen: lubrall
  • arm: kyem
  • back (rear): sur
  • blood: chonga
  • body: apsa
  • bone: oqa
  • brain: sènga
  • chest: ghall
  • ear: mèka
  • elbow: krin
  • eye: agya
  • face: sòl
  • finger: inda
  • flesh: tyaza
  • forehead: nèchäf
  • foot: allga
  • hair (single): zhaj
  • hair (collective): zhajëlad
  • hand: kyur
  • head: chäf
  • heart: rocha
  • knee: kubya
  • leg: khära
  • mouth: mim
  • muscle: zuna
  • neck: ghaf
  • nose: khun
  • skeleton: lejoqa
  • skin: prall
  • spine: oqoza
  • stomach: cheld
  • sweat: kwèd
  • tear (drop): osi
  • thumb: kyu (neuter, declined as kyuw-)
  • toe: alyinda
  • tongue: lèta
  • tooth: käga
Bodily terms
  • alive: dervant
  • awake: äskent
  • dead: lont
  • dream: omi
  • fat: vukh
  • sick: blòkh
  • skinny: tris
  • tired: zorant
  • to die: lo-
  • to kill: dyèg-
  • to live: derva-
  • to sleep: rhèch-
  • to wake: äske-
Bodily actions
  • to breathe: dèrèlo-
  • to catch: kòp-
  • to cry: ajn-
  • to dance: tatyer-
  • to drink: kabus-
  • to eat: tum-
  • to hold: yfily-
  • to kick: algèlo-
  • to kiss: alym-
  • to laugh: jejs-
  • to lie (down): dwe-
  • to run: okhyn-
  • to shout: eja-
  • to smile: miwe-
  • to sit: bun-
  • to stand: minla-
  • to swim: tso-
  • to throw: ghur-
  • to walk: brin-
The senses
  • sense: llad
  • smell: awsönda
  • taste: atyënda
  • to feel: luch-
  • to hear: ablon-
  • to listen for: èkhlyd-
  • to look at: tojs-
  • to see: ivit-
  • to smell: aws-
  • to sniff: nyaz-
  • to taste: aty-
  • to touch: tejv-

Let’s make a language, part 17b: The body (Isian)

Isian speakers, as we have stated, are ordinary humans living on a slightly altered Earth. Thus, they have human bodies, human senses, and human needs. That makes things much easier for us conlangers, at the expense of being a bit less interesting. But we’ve already made that decision; it’s too late to turn back now.

Parts of the body

The Isian language has a lot of terms for the various parts of the human body, but we’ll only cover some of them here. Otherwise, this post would be far too long.

In Isian, the body is har. That could be any body, but it’s also specifically a human one. Bodies are covered in kirot “skin”, placed over nush “flesh” and colosi “bones”. Those bones make up the colohar “skeleton”, with its center at the caycha “backbone”.

One of the most important parts of the body is the head, gol. Not only does it hold most of the setes “senses”, but it’s also considered the center of the self in Isian philosophy. But that’s a different post entirely. From a physical standpoint, we can see the bisi “eyes”, nun “nose”, ula “mouth”, and pos “ears”. The mouth also contains the teeth (teni) and tongue (dogan), and the whole head is topped by pel “hair”. And, of course, the head also holds the brain, sayban.

Moving down, we see the if “neck”, which leads to the sinal. That word represents either the torso as a whole or just the chest, with dosar standing for the lower half. Two of the more important organs inside the sinal are the heart, sir, and the stomach, go.

Except for an unlucky few, Isians have two toni and two duli, “arms” and “legs”, respectively. At the end of each arm is a fesh “hand”, with four ilcas “fingers” and a dun “thumb”. The legs, on the other hand, have puscat “feet”, each with five chut “toes”.

Senses and perception

Isian speakers recognize the same five senses (setes) we do. They can chere “see”, mawa “hear”, cheche “taste”, nore “smell”, and shira “touch”. And each of these has a corresponding “abstract” noun representing the sense. For example, the sense of smell is norenas, and taste is chechenas.

Actions

The body can do many amazing things, and Isian has words for all of them, but we’ll only showcase a few here.

People have to hama “eat”, and that’s a verb we’ve encountered a few times in this series. They also like to jesa “drink”. We must hifa “breathe”, as well, but that one’s not as exciting.

When we’re sad, we might acho “cry”, and when we’re happy, we’ll shira “smile”. If we get tired (taprado), it’s time to deya “lie down” and then inama “sleep”. But we will ture “wake” the next morning.

And finally, we all liga “live”, but, as they say, all men must nayda “die”.

Word list

Here’s a full list of new words made for this part, including some that weren’t mentioned above, and the other “bodily” words that we met earlier on in the series. They’re mostly divided into the same categories as in the post.

Body parts
  • abdomen: dosar
  • arm: ton
  • back (rear): bes
  • blood: miroc
  • body: har
  • bone: colos
  • brain: sayban
  • chest (torso): sinal
  • ear: po(s)
  • elbow: copar
  • eye: bis
  • face: fayan
  • finger: ilca(s)
  • flesh: nush
  • forehead: golamat
  • foot: pusca
  • hair (single): pardel
  • hair (collective): pel (or pardelcat)
  • hand: fesh
  • head: gol
  • heart: sir
  • knee: gali
  • leg: dul
  • mouth: ula
  • muscle: wachad
  • neck: if
  • nose: nun
  • skeleton: colohar
  • skin: kirot
  • spine: caycha
  • stomach: go
  • sweat: wec
  • tear (drop): ger
  • thumb: dun
  • toe: chu
  • tongue: dogan
  • tooth: ten
Bodily terms
  • alive: ligado
  • awake: turedo
  • dead: naydo
  • dream: wish
  • fat: khol
  • sick: peg
  • skinny: jit
  • tired: taprado
  • to die: nayda
  • to kill: acla
  • to live: liga
  • to sleep: inama
  • to wake: ture
Bodily actions
  • to breathe: hifa
  • to catch: sokhe
  • to cry: acho
  • to dance: danteri
  • to drink: jesa
  • to eat: hama
  • to hold: otasi
  • to kick: kuga
  • to kiss: fusa
  • to laugh: eya
  • to lie (down): deya
  • to run: hota
  • to shout: heyde
  • to smile: shira
  • to sit: uba
  • to stand: ayba
  • to swim: sosho
  • to throw: bosa
  • to walk: coto
The senses
  • sense: sete(s)
  • smell: norenas
  • taste: chechenas
  • to feel: ilsi
  • to hear: mawa
  • to listen for: lamo
  • to look at: dachere
  • to see: chere
  • to smell: nore
  • to sniff: nisni
  • to taste: cheche
  • to touch: shira

Let’s make a language, part 17a: The body (Intro)

Humans are conceited beings, if you think about it. A great portion of the vocabulary of any language is dedicated to talking about ourselves. About our bodies, their parts, the things they can do. In fact, the field of bodily language is so big that there’s no way I could put it all into a single post, so this part will have to be restricted to just a small portion of it: the bodily organs, the senses, and the actions involving either.

Head to toe

You should have a good idea of what goes into a human body. After all, you’ve got one. We’re animals, mammals, primates…but we’re also humans, descendants of Homo sapiens. Our bodies are all our own, but they follow the same general blueprint evolution has given us. The way we speak of those bodies flows from that, but cultural influences are also in play here. The terminology of the body in English, for example, is a melting pot of ancient words, technical terms, loanwords, and colorful euphemisms. Other languages aren’t much different, though the ratios of these four categories will differ.

But let’s start with the body itself. Look at yourself in the mirror, and you’ll see the basic outline of the human body. We’ve got three major segments, as you might vaguely recall from science classes: the head, thorax, and abdomen. Nobody really talks about those last two in that way, however. Instead, we speak of the chest, the torso, and so on. That’s probably because the idea of humans as segmented creatures came about comparatively late, and as a more scientific endeavor.

The head, though, is the most important. It’s what we look at first, and it’s where we look out from. The head is centered around the brain, and most of our sense organs are arranged around it. We’ve got the eyes, ears, and nose for the senses of sight, hearing, and smell, respectively. The mouth, with its teeth, tongue, and lips, is used for taste, eating, and speech. On top (for most of us), we’ve got the hair—the full covering on one’s head can have the same word as an individual strand, or there can be a count/mass distinction. Other, less interesting bits include the forehead between the eyes and hairline, the cheeks on the sides, the chin at the bottom, etc.

Our heads are connected to the rest of our bodies by the neck on the outside and the throat inside, with skeletal support provided by the spine or backbone, which runs from the brain all the way down the torso. The chest is largely self-explanatory, though it does show one of the sexual differences in our species, the breast. The abdomen’s important parts are all on the inside, except for the buttocks and that other distinguishing characteristic, the sex organs or genitals.

We’ve also got four limbs (unless you’re one of the unlucky ones that had one or more amputated). These come in pairs, because symmetry is good. The arms are up top, ranging from the shoulder where they meet the torso, down the upper arm (English doesn’t have a specific term for this, but other languages do) to the elbow, then to the forearm and the wrist, finally ending at the hand. Hands have a palm and five digits: four fingers and a thumb, with the latter sometimes grouped as a fifth finger. The fingers have joints—the knuckles—and a protective covering, the nail or fingernail.

Our other pair of limbs took a different evolutionary path, thanks to our bipedal nature, but most of their parts have analogies in the arms. The leg begins at the hip, the abdominal counterpart to the shoulder. Down from this is the thigh, which ends at the knee. The knee then gives way to the calf, then the ankle, and finally to the foot. Feet, like hands, have five digits, the toes, but these are less distinct than their upper-body cousins. The bottom of the foot is our interface to the ground, and it is contains the heel at the back and the ticklish sole in the middle.

Lastly, the entire surface of the body is covered in skin. The fingers and toes have nails, as mentioned above. And hair is everywhere, although it’s at its thickest on the head. Sometimes, the thinner hair in other parts of the body grows thicker; the most common regions for this are the chest, armpits, pelvis, and back. Languages might choose to acknowledge this fact with a separate word, but it’s more likely that they’ll use phrases, as in English “chest hair” and “pubic hair”.

Internal affairs

That about covers the exterior of our bodies. Now, it’s on to the insides. We all have a skeletal structure made up of bones, with the spine being the most important set of those. Some of those bones have common names, and many others have medical or scientific ones; besides the ribs, most conlangs won’t need them for a long time.

Bones give us our shape, but we’re powered by blood. It flows throughout the body in various vessels, including the arteries, veins, and capillaries. As with the names of individual bones, these aren’t necessarily terms beginning conlangers need to worry about, but you can put them on your checklist. Other bits of the body’s interior that you might want to name include fat and muscle, mostly treated as substances rather than body parts. (Except, of course, when you pull a muscle. Then you’ll know that it’s there.)

The organs are the big boys, though. These are the systems that make our bodies work. The brain’s the main thing, and we met it above. The heart, the body’s pumping station, is next on the list, and the lungs are the third member of the all-important trinity. Most of the other internal organs are concerned with one of three things: eating, reproducing, or removing waste. Those that have common names include the stomach, liver, and kidneys, among others. And modern medicine has names for everything, something to keep in mind if you’re making a futuristic conlang.

Actions of the body

Our bodies can do many things, some of them even wonderful. Most of the main verbs regarding bodily actions, however, fall into three groups. Sensory verbs are those that indicate the use of the five senses: see, hear, smell, taste, and feel. English, among other languages, also has a set that connotes the “intentional” use of some of these. In addition to passively seeing and hearing, we can actively look for and listen for.

Another set concerns the use of various parts of our body to perceive or move through the world. We can hold with our hands or touch with our fingers, and our feet and legs help us to walk or run. Although it’s more of a mental task than a physical one, we can also think or perceive. Linguistically, many of these verbs will be intransitive or even impersonal, except those that directly affect something other than ourselves.

The third main class of body verbs is concerned with making the body work. We eat and drink and breathe to provide the necessary inputs, for instance. Most of the “other” end of things is represented by a collection of verbs, and that brings us to a point important enough to earn its own section.

The body and taboo

Probably nothing else in the world is the subject of more cultural factors than the human body. Peoples from all around the world routinely censor their own speech when talking about it, resorting to paraphrases and euphemisms when discussing it. Uncountably many slang terms are dedicated to (or derived from) its function. The body, as thousands of years and billions of speakers can attest, is taboo.

These taboos are not random or idiosyncratic. They’re the result of cultural and linguistic evolution, a consensus of a language’s speakers (sometimes intentionally, as in the banning of certain words, but just as often a subconscious following of unspoken etiquette). They’re very much enduring, and they are not at all identical across language borders.

What parts of the body are most likely to be considered verboten very much depends on the surrounding culture. For many, anything coming from the insides is unworthy of “proper” speech. This includes bodily waste, an area where standard English has no fewer than four different forms, including a vulgar, a scientific, a mild “standard”, and a special form for speaking to children. Some go further, putting blood and spit into the vulgar category and requiring euphemisms for them. (In older English, this was the case specifically for Christ’s wounds, one of the causes leading to “bloody” as an expletive.)

Reproductive organs and acts are another area of taboo. For all that we, as a species, love having sex, we certainly don’t like to talk about it, at least not in direct terms. A few simple searches should net you more terms in this category than you ever wanted to know, from F-bombs and C-words to things you never knew you never wanted to know.

In your language

The body of words (see what I did there?) about the human form is enormous. Fortunately for conlangers, you don’t have to tackle it all at once. Most of the major parts of the body have their own basic words, and that holds true across many languages. In English, for example, the only big areas that use derived terms are the forehead, eyelid, eyebrow, forearm, and armpit. Everything else is fairly isolated, so you can make the words as you need them.

It’s also possible to be more distinctive than English. One way to do this is by naming those parts that we don’t have a single word for. The fingers, for example, do have English names. They’re the index, middle, ring, and little fingers. But why does on the smallest have its own name: pinky? That doesn’t have to be the case; many languages do have separate terms for all the fingers. (And some of those use them for counting.)

Most of our “medical” terms for the body ultimately derive from Latin and Greek, our historical educated languages. For an auxlang, it’s a very good idea to follow that trend. They’re internationally known at this point. Artlangs, on the other hand, might want to do things differently. Those in a fictional world could have their own ancient “learned” language, from which the vernacular borrowed its names.

And don’t forget about taboo, slang, and the like. The body, as important as it is to us, is frequently a very private affair. In polite company, we throw up, but among our friends, we’re happy to puke. We’ll teach a child to pee-pee, but a doctor will tell you to urinate. When talking about our own bodies, we come perilously close to speaking a different language entirely.

Next time around

After the usual trips to Isian and Ardari, we’ll be back here for another round of vocabulary. The focus of the next few months will be on the world itself. First, we’re going to look at the lay of the land, where we’ll gain a whole new set of “natural” geographical terms. Then, we’ll see the plants and flowers and trees that inhabit that land. And Part 20 of the series, hopefully coming in October, will see us journey through the animal kingdom.

If all goes according to plan, that’ll mark a time for me to take a break. But never fear. The series isn’t even halfway over. There’s a whole universe of possibilities left to explore.

Weird (but human) languages

Artists like the weird and the wild. Most people do, if you think about it, but only they are in the position to show off their love of the strange to a wider audience. And conlangs can be a form of art, as we know. So as you’d expect, many conlangers want to produce a language that is…weird.

This can take many forms. Some are languages so complex that they are essentially unlearnable, like Ithkuil. Others are minimalistic to the extreme, as with Toki Pona. A few are truly alien conlangs, in that they have some quality that renders them impossible for humans to speak or comprehend. If you’re into that, it can be quite fun. Or so I’ve heard; I’ve never actually tried it myself.

For the purposes of this post, we’ll ignore the alien segment of the weird and focus on what can plausibly be considered a human language. That means sticking to the IPA, not violating (too many) linguistic universals, and so on. Even with those restrictions, we can get something completely out of the ordinary, so let’s see just how weird we can make things.

Eye of the beholder

Weirdness is subjective. We can’t really measure it, but we can feel it. But the threshold for being weird is different for different people. For example, I find Irish orthography to be impenetrable, and I don’t know how anyone can keep the honorifics of Japanese straight. Clicks baffle me, and I want to throw up whenever I try to pronounce some of the sounds of Arabic. But each of those four is considered “normal” by millions of people.

Likewise, it’s tempting to jump straight to the extremes. Yes, an overly complicated phonology and grammar will make a conlang weird, but probably not in a good way. Some of the best satire comes from taking a proposition to its logical conclusion. Weirdness in a language can be accomplished in the same fashion. Instead of throwing in a hundred phonemes and forty cases, it can be better to work with smaller sets used differently. But extremes can be good, too.

Phonology

Phonology is probably the best place to experiment with the boundaries of human language. A conlang’s phonology determines its “sound”, and what sounds weirder than mouth noises you’ve never heard before?

Every sound or distinction on the IPA chart appears in some human language, but that doesn’t mean they all appear together. Most languages have phoneme series. You’ll have, say, a voiced velar stop and a voiceless one, and then there might be a velar nasal and a fricative. Weirdness can come with an isolated sound, one that doesn’t fit the pattern. Maybe a retroflex approximant, or a uvular trill, or a single vowel that can be nasalized.

You can also get weirdness out of a distinction that doesn’t normally occur with a certain set of sounds. Voiceless nasals are an obvious candidate, as nasals are very weak sounds that tend to assimilate in every conceivable way. Giving them a voicing dichotomy is odd, but it does happen in real life—Icelandic and Burmese are but two examples.

Unfamiliar sounds are another way of making a conlang feel outlandish. Many African languages have consonants that are doubly articulated, pronounced as a labial and velar at the same time. (The Igbo language even has one in its name.) But those sounds are virtually unknown in Europe and North America. Click sounds are probably at the far end of this line of thinking; they’re mostly limited to a single language family, so they’ll sound weird to just about everybody else.

And, of course, what discussion of phonological oddity would be complete without the extremes? Those click languages I just mentioned have some of the largest phonemic inventories in the world, some containing over 100 different consonants. The max for everybody else is 80, a record held by Ubykh, which went extinct in 1992. As if that weren’t bad enough, Ubykh also sets the mark for the fewest phonemic vowels: two, /a/ and /ə/. (Thankfully, that number jumps to ten or eleven if you add in allophones.)

At the other end of the spectrum are Hawaiian (about 13 phonemes, depending on who’s counting), the Rotokas language of Papua New Guinea (11 phonemes and maybe a length distinction in vowels), and the conlanger’s darling Pirahã, a language of the Amazon (10 or 11 phonemes and two tones). All of these are about as low as you can go and still be reasonably human.

Grammar

For grammar, strangeness comes from making unexpected decisions. We still need a good framework—we’re making languages that could theoretically be learned, remember—but we’re looking for ways to twist it into something outrageous. Fortunately, the real world offers plenty of examples.

Case is the big one here, and look no further than Finnish and its relatives for inspiration. (Conlangers love baroque case systems, and that love is not limited to “weird” languages, even if that’s where it belongs.) Need a case that describes a changing away? A dialect of Finnish has it: the exessive.

Other grammatical categories can similarly be abused. Gender doesn’t have to be masculine-feminine. It could be human-inhuman, or a class system like Swahili’s. Quite a few languages have a dual number, representing two of something. A small number of them also have a special form for three.

On the verbal side, the past, present, and future are the basic tenses, but why not go wild? Maybe your weird conlang has two tenses: “now” and “not now”, a merger of the past and future. Or maybe it has ten, with distinctions for yesterday and tomorrow and whatever else you can think of. That’s not too far out there, and the same goes for aspect and mood and whatever else you can think of.

If you’re the type to like WALS, look for the categories it says are rare, yet still attested. That’s where weirdness—if not madness—lies.

Lexicon

Lexicon is a bit harder to make weird, if only because English has such a huge vocabulary that there’s probably already a word for anything you can imagine. If not, then some other language has it, and you can just borrow that.

Your best bet here might be to try for subtlety. Change the connotations of words so that they align imperfectly with their English counterparts. If your conlang allows any sort of compounding, offer lots of idiosyncratic constructions. Make words with fine shades of meaning that nonetheless seem to pop up all the time. Just be different.

If you like extra work, you can even delve into the odd world of taboo. Some languages, for instance, go as far as having a separate lexicon that must be used in certain situations. In more familiar territory, slang can become standard, obscenity commonplace. Imagine a language where the most widely-known idioms can only be translated as something horribly offensive. (Okay, that one’s not even that far-fetched. I live in the South, remember.) Conversely, a language full of euphemisms for even mundane objects and tasks would sound just as strange to our ears.

The outer limits

Weird languages are all about exploring the farthest reaches of what makes our speech human. Languages are learned, so they have limits, but the linguistic space must be vast enough to encompass every natural language that exists or has ever existed. Conlangs, unconstrained by the need for evolutionary plausibility, can fill any part of that space.

Yet there are lines which cannot be crossed without leaving the realm of human language. For those, you’ll have to wait for future posts.

Let’s make a language – Part 16c: Time (Ardari)

As before, we have a decision to make. Ardari is a bit more difficult, but I’ve chosen to place it in the same “alternate” Earth of Isian. It’s a few thousand miles removed, however, being located in a forgotten part of Western Asia, around the southern Caucasus. This is an area with plenty of space for a “lost” culture, but one that could plausibly have contact with historical civilizations. And it makes things easier for me, because I don’t have to do as much worldbuilding, meaning I can focus more on the conlang itself.

The time of day

The Ardari word for “day”, jan, is totally not the same as Isian ja, despite their visual similarity. But it’s equally central to the Ardari culture’s notion of time. Being an Earthbound language, it’s 24 hours (uld) long, and each hour has 60 minutes (weyn), each of which contains 60 seconds (timi).

Days officially begin at olongoz “midnight”. From midnight to 6:00 AM is the gozoza (roughly speaking, the “late night”). (Dawn, or ärchi, comes at different times throughout the year, as does khowchi “dusk”, so these periods are approximate.) After dawn is the chèrni “morning”, which lasts until noon, called either inyi or the more formal olonyan. The next six hours are the nèchinyi “afternoon”, while the period from 6:00 PM to midnight is the sulta “evening”.

A period of a few days is a vach “week”; this has historically been anywhere from 5 to 7 days, but outside pressure has forced Ardari to standardize on a seven-day week. Months are literally “moons”, using the same noun: duli. Ardari speakers keep a lunar calendar for certain holidays (tsijan), but this is linked to a solar calendar used to calculate the avèch “year”.

This same solar calendar tracks the seasons (zedra). There are four main seasons: kyof “winter”, tingli “spring”, sadya “summer”, and kadyll “autumn”. These can also be divided into smaller periods, such as a harvest season, but those have no specific names.

Human time

Time (tänölad) is also considered important in human terms, particularly the notion of age, or pòdymat. People can be jers “young” or pòd “old”, and those older ones are often granted higher standing, becoming dämbar “revered”.

Histories speak of the past (pèls), but the present (brogh) is also on Ardari speakers’ minds, and many are always looking to the future (dwanar). Today (zalyan) is the day when things happen, but yesterday (birjan) is the time that was, and tomorrow (kwanyan) is what will come.

Some things are always (zalajch) the same, while others never (dulajch) are. Actions begin (sòto-) and end (jop-), and they sometimes abruptly stop (uq-). And we are often (vurtän) left to wait (rhèta-).

Next up

It’s fun to ponder time, but now we must depart for the future. The next part of this series will delve into the workings of the human body, and we’ll come out with close to a hundred new items in our lexicon, covering us from head to toe.

Word List

As with Isian, the choice of words comes from the Universal Language Dictionary, a great resource for lexical ideas. Instead of walking you through which word belongs to which part of speech, I’ll assume you’ve read previous entries in this series.

Relative terms

  • early: ächem
  • eventually: nèchdwanar
  • future: dwanar
  • late: zolz
  • long ago: jöghpèls
  • now: nyas
  • on time: motön
  • past: pèls
  • present: brogh
  • recently: jöghnyas
  • soon: nèchnyas
  • today: zalyan
  • tomorrow: kwanyan
  • yesterday: birjan

Units of time

  • century: grusö
  • day (period): jan
  • decade: kyänsö
  • hour: uld
  • minute: weyn
  • moment: win
  • month: duli
  • period: gracha
  • second: timi
  • week: vach
  • year: avèch

Calendar

  • afternoon: nèchinyi
  • date: jënäl
  • dawn: ärchi
  • day (time): tulyana
  • dusk: khowchi
  • evening: sulta
  • fall (autumn): kadyll
  • holiday: tsijan
  • middle of the night: olongoz (or gozoza “deepest night”)
  • midnight: olongoz
  • morning: chèrni
  • night: goz
  • noon: inyi (or olonyan “midday”)
  • season: zedra
  • spring: tingli
  • summer: sadya
  • winter: kyof

Miscellaneous

  • again: jejan
  • age: pòdymat
  • already: päntös
  • always: zalajch
  • ever: manölajch
  • interval: lon
  • irregular: unonall
  • long (duration): tur
  • never: dulajch
  • new: vän
  • often: vurtän
  • old: pòd “old”; dämbar “revered, ancient”
  • rarely: bintän
  • regular: nonall
  • short (duration): nèr
  • still: jodös
  • time (abstract): tänölad
  • time (instance): tän (or lajch “time of day”)
  • to begin: sòto-
  • to continue: sovo-
  • to end: jop-
  • to pause: plada-
  • to stop: uq-
  • to wait: rhèta-
  • young: jers

Let’s make a language – Part 16b: Time (Isian)

I’ve been putting this off for quite a while, but now I have to make a decision for both of our example conlangs. The subject matter of this part is too tied to culture and history to ignore the problem any longer. Something has to be done.

So, here’s the dirty secret I’ve been keeping from you for the first 15 parts of this series: Isian and Ardari are languages spoken by ordinary humans. These humans live in an alternate version of our world, one about 100 years behind us in technology, but whose only other major difference is the existence of these two languages and their (entirely hypothetical) relatives. In particular, Isian fits somewhere in Central Europe, in a remote area untroubled by most of history.

Keeping time

How does this affect the language’s vocabulary of time? Well, it simplifies our job, first of all. We can assume that Isian’s speakers fit into a relatively familiar culture, one influenced enough by Western civilization that it has adopted most of our notions of how time is counted.

Isian timekeeping is centered around the day, or ja. For most, this period is divided into jamet and choc—day and night, respectively. The day starts at sidamay “dawn”, continuing through marchi “morning”, jalo “noon”, and meshul “afternoon”, before ending at sidesto “dusk”. The night begins then, with its first period the evening, or daga. This is followed by choclo “midnight”, and the nebulous, unnamed time until the next dawn.

On a more scientific level, an Isian ja contains 24 eprani “hours”. Each epran is subdivided into 60 indes, and each inde is made up of 60 tofani. (Tofan “second” is also used for the ordinal numeral “second”. This is what’s called a calque or loan translation: Isian speakers borrowed the term from the West, but translated it into their own language.) Smaller units of time aren’t yet needed.

The Isian calendar is a Western one, with a week, or eg, of seven days. Months, or nolosi, are of differing lengths, from 28 to 31 days, just like our own. There are twelve of these in a year, or egal. Two other terms are compounds made in imitation of Western practice: the polegal “decade” and the camboregal “century”, literally “10-year” and “100-year”.

More important than the individual months are kechoni, the seasons. Like many living in temperate climates, Isian speakers divide the year into four of these. Following Western tradition, the year starts in gulis “winter”. In order, the others are lalis, khehas, and awash. And all the seasons have a nice set of holidays, or deljat.

The order of events

The adverb nec refers to “now”, roughly the current time. A number of other adjectives and adverbs exist in Isian to speak of periods relative to this moment. We can, for instance, talk of past, present, and future events: tesman, dandas, and imbas, respectively. Something could have happened opani “recently”, or it may instead occur ebani “soon”.

Most people are marni “on time”. Some lucky few, however, are ker “early”. And we all know someone who is habitually falor “late”.

Today is always neyja, no matter which day it actually is. The day before that, yesterday, is perja. Conversely, tomorrow will ever be boja.

We also have a few time-related verbs to introduce. A specific action can begin (nawe) and end (tarki). Sometimes we have to pause (gahi) it, only to continue (etenawe) again later. Finally, too much time is wasted when we have to wait (holca).

Word List

Instead of a big table containing all the words, I’m formatting these in a series of lists, each covering one broad segment of this post’s topic. The Isian words and phrases are in italics. Also, these words are chosen from Rick Harrison’s excellent Universal Language Dictionary; I’ll likely be using it for future posts in this vein.

Relative terms

These are words which identify a time with respect to another, usually the present. Many are adjectives, and these are regularly converted to adverbs by using hi, as seen in Part 9.

  • early: ker
  • eventually: imbasgo hi
  • future: imbas
  • late: falor
  • long ago: tesmango hi
  • now: nec
  • on time: marni
  • past: tesman
  • present: dandas
  • recently: opani
  • soon: ebani
  • today: neyja (hi)
  • tomorrow: boja (hi)
  • yesterday: perja (hi)

Units of time

This set of words specifically represents amounts of time. Grammatically, they are all nouns.

  • century: camboregal
  • day (period): ja
  • decade: polegal
  • hour: epran
  • minute: inde(s)
  • moment: mim
  • month: nolos
  • period: sudad
  • second: tofan
  • week: eg
  • year: egal

Calendar

These are terms referring to parts of a day or year. Most are nouns, and a few are compounds formed in the manner described in Part 14.

  • afternoon: meshul
  • date: jani
  • dawn: sidamay
  • day (time): jamet
  • dusk: sidesto
  • evening: daga
  • fall (autumn): awash
  • holiday: delja
  • midnight: choclo
  • morning: marchi(r)
  • night: choc
  • noon: jalo
  • season: kechon
  • spring (season): lalis
  • summer: khehas
  • twilight: jachoc
  • winter: gulis

Miscellaneous

This is a set of “other” time words. I didn’t really discuss many of these in the body of the post, but Isian is supposed to be familiar, so most are fairly close in connotation to their English glosses.

  • again: jon (or et-)
  • age: res
  • already: nenumi
  • always: sotanum
  • ever: esenum
  • interval: num
  • irregular: anuritan
  • long (duration): lum
  • never: anum
  • new: ekho
  • often: nungo hi
  • old: afed
  • rarely: nuchi hi
  • regular: nurit
  • short (duration): wis
  • still: numida
  • time (abstract): khorom
  • time (instance): num
  • to begin: nawe
  • to continue: etenawe
  • to end: tarki
  • to pause: gahi
  • to stop: tarca
  • to wait: holca
  • young: manir

Writing World War II

Today, there is no more popular war than World War II. No other war in history has been the focus of so much attention, attention that spans the gap between nonfiction and fiction. And for good reason, too. World War II gave us some of the most inspiring stories, some of the most epic battles (in the dramatic and FX senses), and an overarching narrative that perfectly fits so many of the common conflicts and tropes known to writers.

The list of WWII-related stories is far too big for this post to even scratch the surface, so I won’t even try. Suffice to say, in the 70 years since the war ended, thousands of works have been penned, ranging from the sappy (Pearl Harbor) to the gritty (Saving Private Ryan), from lighthearted romp (Red Tails) to cold drama (Schindler’s List). Oh, and those are only the movies. That’s not counting the excellent TV series (Band of Brothers, The Pacific) or the myriad books concerning this chapter of our history.

World War II, then, is practically a genre of its own, and it’s a very cluttered one. No matter the media, a writer wishing to tackle this subject will have a harder time than usual. Most of the “good” stories have been done, and done well. In America, at least, many the heroes are household names: Easy Company, the Tuskegee Airmen, the USS Arizona and the Enola Gay. The places are etched into our collective memory, as well, from Omaha Beach and Bastogne to Pearl Harbor, Iwo Jima, and Hiroshima. It’s a crowded field, to put it mildly.

Time is running out

But you’re a writer. You’re undaunted. You’ve got this great idea for a story set in WWII, and you want to tell it. Okay, that’s great. Just because something happened within the last century doesn’t get you out of doing your homework.

First and foremost, now is the last good chance to write a WWII story. By “now”, I mean within the next decade, and there’s a very good reason for that. This is 2016. The war ended right around 70 years ago. Since most of the soldiers were conscripted, many right out of high school, or young volunteers, they were typically about 18 to 25 years old when they went into service. The youngest WWII veterans are at least in their late 80s, with most in their 90s. They won’t live forever. We’ve seen that in this decade, as the final World War I veterans passed on, and an entire era left living memory.

Yes, there are uncountably many interviews, written or recorded, with WWII vets. The History Channel used to show nothing else. But nothing compares to a face-to-face conversation with someone who literally lived through history. One of the few good things to come out of my public education was the chance to meet one of the real Tuskegee Airmen, about twenty years ago. The next generation of schoolchildren likely won’t have that same opportunity.

Give it a shot

Whether through personal contact or the archives and annals of a generation, you’ll need research. Partly, that’s for the same reason: WWII is within living memory, so you have eyewitnesses who can serve as fact-checkers. (Holocaust deniers, for instance, will only get bolder once there’s no one left who can directly prove them wrong.) Also, WWII was probably the most documented war of all time. Whatever battle you can think of, there’s some record of it. Unlike previous conflicts, there’s not a lot of room to slip through the cracks.

On the face of it, that seems to limit the space available for historical fiction. But it’s not that bad. Yes, the battles were documented, as were many of the units, the aircraft, and even the strategies. However, they didn’t write down everything. It’s easy enough to pick a unit—bonus points if it’s one that was historically wiped out to the man, so there’s no one left to argue—and use it as the basis for your tale.

And that highlights another thing about WWII. War stories of older times often fixate on a single soldier, a solitary hero. With World War II, though, we begin to see the unit itself becoming a character. That’s how it worked with Band of Brothers, for instance. And this unit-based approach is a good one for a story focused on military actions. Soldiers don’t fight alone, and so many of the great field accomplishments of WWII were because of the bravery of a squad, a company, or a squadron.

If your story happens away from the front lines, on the other hand, then it’s back to individuals. And what a cast of characters you have. Officers, generals, politicians, spies…you name it, you can find it. But these tend to be more well-known, and that does limit your choices for deviating from history.

Diverging parallels

While the war itself is popular enough, as are some of the events that occurred at the same time, what happened after is just as ripe for storytelling. Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle (based on the Philip K. Dick story of the same name) is one such example of an alternate WWII, and I’ve previously written a post that briefly touched on another possible outcome.

I think the reason why WWII gets so much attention from the alternate-history crowd is the potential for disaster. The “other” side—the Axis—was so evil that giving them a victory forces a dystopian future, and dystopia is a storyteller’s favorite condition, because it’s a breeding ground for dramatic conflict and tension. And there’s also a general sense that we got the best possible outcome from the war; thus, following that logic, any other outcome is an exercise in contrast. It’s not the escapism that I like from my fiction, but it’s a powerful statement in its own right, and it may be what draws you into the realm of what-ifs.

The post I linked above is all about making an alternate timeline, but I’ll give a bit of a summary here. The assumption is that everything before a certain point happened exactly as it did, but one key event didn’t. From there, everything changes, causing a ripple effect up to the present. For World War II, that’s only 70 years, but that’s more than enough time for great upheaval.

Most people will jump to one conclusion there: the Nazis win. True, that’s one possible (but unlikely, in my opinion) outcome, but it’s not the only one. Some among the allies argued for a continuation of the war, moving to attack the Soviets next. That would have preempted the entire Cold War, with all the knock-on effects that would have caused. What if Japan hadn’t surrendered? Imagine a nuclear bomb dropped on Tokyo, and what that would do to history. The list goes on, ad infinitum.

Fun, fun, fun

Any genre fits World War II. Any kind of story can be told within that span of years. Millions of people were involved, and billions are still experiencing its reverberations. Although it’s hard to talk of a war lasting more than half a decade as a single event, WWII is, collectively speaking, the most defining event of the last century. It’s a magnet for storytelling, as the past 70 years have shown. In a way, despite the horrors visited upon the world during that time, we can even see it as fun.

Too many people see World War II as Hitler, D-Day, Call of Duty, and nukes. But it was far more than that. It was the last great war, in many ways. And great wars make for great stories, real or fictional.