Category: Writing

More on calendars

When this post goes up, it will be the start of 2016. A new year. Time to throw out those old calendars and set up the new ones. (Well, probably not. Most people just use the calendars on their computers or phones these days.) But before you toss that record of the old year, take a look at it, because it’s actually quite interesting.

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about holidays. This time around, I’m going to look at the whole calendar. Not just our own, mind you, but others throughout history and the modern world. Some of them have features that might be useful to a writer looking to make his fantasy world distinctive.

Into the west

Let’s start with our familiar western calendar. It’s the simplest, but only because we’re familiar with it; if we grew up using, say, the Islamic calendar, then we would be used to that. Now, you already know the basics, if you’re above the age of 4. The year is divided into twelve months, beginning in January and ending in December. Months have fixed numbers of days, but they aren’t the same: we’ve got four of them with 30 days, seven with 31, and then February, which can have 29 in leap years (like this one), but normally has 28.

Months can then be divided into weeks of 7 days each (though only February divides exactly). Days, of course, are 24 hours long, not counting Daylight Saving Time, and hours are subdivided into 60 minutes, which are, in turn, subdivided into 60 seconds. Going back to the other end, years are counted from the putative birth of Christ, with the only real nod to religious diversity being the “modern” names for either side of the dividing line: Christian Era (CE) and Before Christian Era (BCE) versus the traditional Anno Domini (AD) and Before Christ (BC). We can also group the years into decades, centuries, and millennia, but these are more a notational convenience than a function of the calendar.

So that’s what the Western calendar is. But why is it like that? Why are the months uneven? Why does the year start in January? Do we really need leap years?

Let’s start with the first question there. Our calendar is the result of a long chain of cause and effect reaching far back into history, but its current form was largely determined by the Romans. They were the ones that gave us our twelve months, with essentially today’s names. As usual, though, it’s not that simple.

First off, the Roman (Julian, technically; Julius Caesar’s reign saw more than its share of calendar reforms) New Year was in March, so January and February were at the end of the calendar. February 29, the leap day, would have been the last day on the list. The year starting in March basically lasted until the Gregorian reform: sometime since 1582, depending on where you live. (In America, the one time a non-specialist would encounter the Julian-to-Gregorian switchover is in genealogy. Some dates in the 18th century—when Britain and the colonies that would become the US switched—are recorded as OS or NS. These stand for Old Style and New Style, meaning what we now call the Julian and Gregorian calendars, respectively.)

Incidentally, moving the year’s starting date messed up the naming. September comes from the Latin word for “seven”, which you wouldn’t expect from the ninth month. But a few hundred years ago, it would have been linguistically accurate. The same goes for October (eight), November (nine), and December (ten).

Just about the one thing the Romans didn’t give us for our calendar is the AD/BC split. That one came a few centuries later. Before then, years were reckoned from the time of a well-known event or the coronation of a noble figure such as a king or emperor.

Written in the stars

Let’s turn to the scientific aspect of the calendar for now, since that’s where we can get more insight. We’ll get back to the history shortly, I promise.

The year, scientifically speaking, is the time it takes the Earth to orbit the Sun once, while the day is how long it takes our planet to rotate on its axis. These are the only “natural” units of time measurement; weeks and months and hours are all human invention. Both the year and the day can be found by observation: the day is roughly the time between one noon and the next, and the stars (including the Sun) will return to the same position in the night sky after a year. (Technically, this isn’t entirely accurate, but the inaccuracies are far below the calendar’s resolution.)

Clever readers will note that we’ve already run into a big problem: the year is not made of a whole number of days. It’s not 365 days long, nor is it 366. In fact, it’s something like 365.2422 days. So, if our calendar only had 365, we would effectively lose a day about every four years. But if we made every fourth year a day longer, that makes up for the discrepancy. Hence, leap years.

The Julian calendar had one every four years, no matter what. By the time of the Gregorian reform, the difference between 365.2422 and 365.25 had added up, and they had to skip a few days to get things back on track. (How many days depends on when the reform took place.) To stop that from happening again, they also changed the rules to make only certain century years leap years. And that’s why 2000 was special: the next leap year ending in 00 won’t be until 2400.

The sun and the moon

There’s another way to count the days, and it can even work at night. The Western calendar is a solar calendar; it’s based around the sun. But our months are remnants of a connection to a lunar calendar. It’s right there in the name, too.

Other calendars are exclusively lunar in nature. The Islamic calendar is one example. Months start and end based on the phase of the moon, and in many Muslim countries that is a literal statement, even today. But the lunar period isn’t a whole number of days, either, so Islamic months can have either 29 or 30 days. Due to religious circumstances, the Islamic calendar has exactly twelve months, meaning that it will always be short of the solar year. The current year for Muslims is 1437, and the calendar’s epoch (basically, its starting date) was in 622. Simple arithmetic shows that 1394 solar years have passed since then, a difference of 43.

This doesn’t fit with the seasons, but it’s not really meant to. An alternative is to try to combine the lunar and solar cycles into a single calendar. In the West, we have only the remnants of that, in our months, but some other cultures use what’s called a lunisolar calendar. The most familiar example would be the Jewish religious calendar. Here, we still have twelve months, and they’re still based on the cycle of the moon. Normally. But this is a solar calendar, too, and the seasons are important. So, to keep them roughly where they should be, the Jewish calendar adds extra months. It’s like our leap days, but 30 at a time. Seven of these every 19 years keeps things fairly even, plus or minus a month.

From scratch

I’m not going to try to explain the Mayan calendar. It confuses me, so I don’t even know where to begin. Instead, I’ll move on to some thoughts on making a fantasy (or even sci-fi) calendar.

First things first, you need to know the relationship between the year and the day. That’s the key. If you’re working with Earth (or a reasonable facsimile), you already know this, and you can move on. Otherwise, you’re deep in worldbuilding territory, and you’ll probably have to work things out yourself. In that case, remember that it’s going to be pretty rare to have a year with an integral number of days. In fact, it’s almost impossible, and it’s surely temporary. Just about every calendar, with the possible exception of one for an interstellar empire, will have leap days of some sort. They might be scattered throughout the years, or they may come in bunches, but they will be there.

The year and the day mark the cornerstones of the calendar, no matter what kind you have. In between, however, things are wide open. Obviously, lunar-based calendars require at least one moon, and that moon needs to be in an orbit that fits. Phobos, the inner moon of Mars, would be completely useless for a lunar calendar, for example: its orbital period is about 7-1/2 hours. Multiple moons give us the possibility of measuring by conjunctions, but that can get into some heavy math that might be too much for a fantasy world. That’s not to say it’s not worth trying, just that it may not be worth the effort in the end.

Even without a big moon in a nice, useful orbit, cultures would likely develop divisions of time between the day and year. Seasons are appropriate for this, and I’ve got just such a post for that. Weeks are more of an invention of civilization. Our seven-day week dates back to Babylonian times, but many cultures have a shorter period of days than the month. Cyclical religious observances are one excuse for a week, but more mundane concerns, like markets, can also come into play. (A story I’m currently writing has a culture with a week of six days, while the French Revolution tried to institute a ten-day week. About the only place they succeeded was in D&D’s Forgotten Realms setting.)

Now, when the year starts is a question that depends heavily on not just your world but your culture. The Romans liked it in spring, and that has a lot going for it in an agrarian society. The Gregorians moved it to January (to have it closer to Christmas or something like that), but that put it in wintertime. There are arguments for just about any day of the year to be New Year’s, but it’s probably—though not always—going to be at the start of the month, and the date will likely have some cultural, religious, or economic significance.

We can go “below” the day, too, but we begin to run into limitations of technology. Hours are fairly easy, and many early cultures settled on numbers like 12, 24, or 60 of them in a day. Why? For the same reason that there are twelve inches in a foot and twelve (troy) ounces in a pound: it’s easier to divide into halves, fourths, and thirds. (Decimal numbers are great for working on paper, but horrible for eyeballing.) Of course, another planet with a different rotation period will have different hours. On Mars, the obvious “hour” would be about a minute and a half longer than ours.

Measuring minutes and seconds is…harder. It’s likely beyond the reach of many early civilizations, and they likely wouldn’t see the need for it, anyway. We have 60 minutes in an hour or seconds in a minute because, again, 60 is easier to work with until pen and paper are widespread calculating devices. If hours had only been subdivided after the French invented the metric system, we’d probably have 100 of them. (Put the metric system in ancient times, and we would all be using Swatch’s silly Internet Time today, I guess. Anybody remember that thing?)

Last but not least, we come to the reckoning of years. For the West, we count from a monk’s imperfect calculation of the birth of Christ. Muslims go by the rather more specific date of Muhammad’s move to Medina, while Jews start their calendar with the traditional date of the Biblical creation of the world. Other options exist, though. One common one in history is dating by years since a ruler’s rise to the throne; when a new ruler is crowned, a new era begins. Another is a cycle of years called indictions. In this system, the last year of one cycle is followed by the first of a new cycle. We might say that this is the seventh year of the 2010s, for example, or the sixth year of this decade. In a way, the Mesoamerican calendars function something like this. (I’ve actually seen this in fantasy before, too. Scott Lynch, in The Lies of Locke Lamora, has a kind of indiction system. Each year is named after one of the setting’s twelve gods, in a specific order. When the last one is reached, the whole thing loops back to the start.)

Happy New Year

However the calendar works, it gives an otherworldly feel to any fiction. To give you one example, my aforementioned story is set on a different planet. (Well, the first part is mostly set on Earth, but that’s neither here nor there.) That planet has a different day length (24 hours, 23 minutes, approximately) and year length (about 374.16 local days) than our own, meaning that I had to do some work.

What I came up with was a calendar of twelve months, each 30 days long, which doesn’t really have any relation to the orbital period of the planet’s moon; it’s more a matter of convenience. Each month is made of five weeks of six days. The extra days are scattered around the calendar, a few at the end of each season. There are more of them at the end of spring, and fewer at the end of fall, and this has a scientific basis: the eccentricity of the planet’s orbit. Days in this fictional world are 24 hours long, but their hours are slightly longer than our own. Hours can be divided into minutes, and further into seconds, but this is more a math trick than something practical.

You can do things differently, and you probably should. What you make should be tailored for your fictional world, for your story. The key is suspension of disbelief. It doesn’t really make much sense for a world with no connection to Earth at all to be calling their months October and their days Saturday. (I didn’t talk much about the names of the days. They’re pretty obvious, though: planets or gods, not that there’s much difference in older times.) Now, you can say that it’s an author translation of unfamiliar terms, and that’s fine, but taking a little bit of time to work things out can pay off in making your world feel more real.

Let’s make a language – 2016 Special

We’re taking a bit of a week off this time. Don’t worry, there’s more to come later on, but today is the first day of the new year, a time to take a break, a time to reflect on the 366 days to come. (2016 is a leap year, remember.) We’ve gone through ten parts of this series already, and we’ve come a long way. But there’s still a longer way to go, although the pace for this year won’t be quite as hectic.

So, to celebrate this new year of conlanging, here’s what we’re going to do. Today, you’ll get to see the first significant text in each of our two languages, Isian and Ardari. That text is the Babel Text, the first nine verses of Genesis 11. Sure, it’s a religious writing, but that’s okay, because we’re not interested in it for its theology, but for its linguistics.

Babel

The Babel Text is one of those “classic” tests of a conlang. It really has it all, grammatically speaking: tenses, moods, aspects, and all those different kinds of clauses. (Some of them we haven’t seen yet, but we can deal.) Plus, the story itself is about language, the Biblical account of the making of the world’s languages. Essentially, it’s a fable, one originally meant to be told orally. We’ll write it here, though, since that’s easier.

If you want to play along at home, you can use whichever version of the text you like. I’ve gone with this one, derived from the NRSV:

  1. Now the whole earth had one language and the same words.

  2. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there.

  3. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar.

  4. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

  5. The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built.

  6. And the LORD said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them.

  7. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.”

  8. So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city.

  9. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

So that’s what we’re working with. (Yours, of course, may be different.) Now let’s see how it looks in our made-up languages.

Isian

First off, here’s the full text translated into Isian:

  1. Nec hi, e sota sata fanas yan sangoy wa es ilir beti.

  2. Ad ha is mishas si way keres, is cosas ta abe e Shinar tor i, ar is dalegas.

  3. Ad is kis lan es, “Cosa, ad tinte gados, ar becre sota hi sim.” Ar is fanas gadocat sencat afich, wa arcay empan afich.

  4. Toc hi, is kis, “Cosa, ad oste lan ir ta eblon, wa ta farin ke ey poy e timirot i, ar tinte ni lan ir. Loydaro mit hade par nos basagima e fayan e sata o sos.”

  5. E Domo esto cosas ha i chere e eblon wa e farin ke ostec im nakhit at terta.

  6. Ad e Domo kis, “Chere, is e yan cudisa, ar sota sim o fana yan sangoy, ar ne yahi e cu nawe ed ke te im is o. Anocal ke is wachi cu te nec nos e arisosan im ir.

  7. Cosa, esto wasa, ar golbata si sangoy til ni, ha is an nos noyta le gonas terta.”

  8. Teti, e Domo hade basagis sim til fo e fayan e sata o sos, ar is tarcas cu oste e eblon.

  9. Teyno, i par pasa Babel, ha e Domo golbatas til e sangoy e sota sata o todo; ar e Domo basagis til fo e fayan e sata o sos.

Grammar

Most of the grammar is what we’ve already seen. Some of it, though, is new, particularly the adverbs. We’ll get into the details in later parts but here’s a preview that tells you all you need to know to get through the text:

  • Isian adjectives (and some nouns) can be changed into adverbs by putting hi after them. This works much like the English suffix -ly: ichi “beautiful” becomes ichi hi “beautifully”.

  • Adverbs usually go before their verbs, but they can also be moved to the front of a sentence.

  • A whole prepositional phrase can be used like an adverb by putting ha before it.

  • Conjunctions are close to their English counterparts. They’re simple little words that link sentences; in the Babel Text, for example, we have ad and ar, both roughly meaning “and”, but with slightly different connotations. Again, we’ll give them a closer look later on.

We get our first tastes of word derivation here, too:

  • The suffix -cat, when attached to a noun, changes the meaning to that of a material: gado “a brick”; gadocat “brick”.

  • One way to make an adjective into its antonym is by the prefix/suffix pair a-an. We see this in arisosan “impossible”, which is actually derived from risos “possible”.

  • Finally, the suffix -nas can convert a verb into a kind of “abstract” noun: go “to speak”; gonas “speech”.

We’ll see a lot more of derivation in later parts of the series.

Vocabulary
Isian English
abe a plain
ad and then…
ar and (conjunction)
arcay tar (or bitumen)
arisosan impossible
basagi to scatter
bet word
cudisa people, group
domo lord
empan mortar
esto down, downward
farin tower
gado(s) a brick
gadocat brick (material)
golbata to confound
gonas speech
hade away
ilir same
keres while
loydaro otherwise
misha to move
nakhit mortal
nec now
noyta to understand
pasa to call by a name
sangoy language
sencat stone (material)
si east
tarca to stop doing
teti so, because of this
terta so as to…
teyno therefore
til there
timiro heaven
toc then
tor a land
wa and (noun phrase)
wachi to desire, wish
yahi only
yan one

Ardari

Now, let’s switch to Ardari. Again, here’s the full text:

  1. Lokhi omaritö jane kolrachevi sun lagrelltös nyas perodjyn.

  2. Ysar sälltö tov tapsined ky vi, Chinare me dablan wi mokiti lim tonedjyn, ysar jeren wizèledjyn.

  3. Lataj ry isedjyn, “Tonje, tyolton grätje, ajon warhan sechaje.” Gwanan bòte tyoltanvi, pyuryse bòte pamöre peredjyn.

  4. Drä isedjyn, “Tonje, präzdanvi, qa me khaj èlyasòndös wi kombran lataj da mollje. All grätje, sinran omarini sòletö ori oprös utuweryll.”

  5. Tsoratö qa sèlokynar molledadyt präzdantövi kombrantö ivit ky tèghdaradjyn.

  6. Tsoratö isad, “Ivitje. Ysar jane banöladan èllejyn, ysar me laz jane kolrache perejyn, zalman qa aghell me sòto ky èlla. Duqom qa agh ky märyke ysar da urburdosdill.

  7. Tonje, tèghdarje, ysoj kolrache jeren kamrulje, lataj me simënda rejvetell kyus.”

  8. Èlladjyn Tsoratö ysar jeren tov omarini sòletö ori utuweradid kyus, ysar präzdantö moll ky uq.

  9. Yse Babèle filtyda, Tsoratö omarini kolrache jeren kamruladjyn, jeren tov Tsoratö ysar omarini sòletö ori utuwerad byu.

Grammar

Ardari looks much different, doesn’t it? Much more complicated, too. As with Isian, we haven’t really gone over all the grammar bits you need, so here’s a primer:

  • Ardari lets you use most adjectives directly as adverbs, with no changes needed.

  • Nouns, noun phrases, and some adjectives instead require you to follow them with èll ky. (This is the infinitive form of èll- “to be”.) An example would be kone èll ky “like a man, manly”.

  • “Subordinate” clauses are complicated enough that the full story will have to wait. Some of them let you use a bare verb stem followed by ky, like above, and you use them as a postpositional phrase before a sentence’s head verb. Others appear mostly as normal, but they follow the verb. (This is the only way Ardari lets you put something after the main verb of a sentence.)

Ardari’s words also tend to have more subtle shades of meaning, and these don’t always line up with their English translations:

  • nyas means “now”, but only as an adverb
  • drä, meaning “then”, connotes a time long in the past
  • jeren “there” is used for things very far away; closer things instead use pren
  • oprös normally works as an adjective meaning “other”; as an adverb, its meaning becomes “otherwise”
  • kyus denotes an effect or implication
  • èllad literally means “it was”, but it’s also used to introduce a subordinate clause
  • filt- “to know as” is a ditransitive verb, like “to give”

We’ll see conjunctions later on, but we have two here. They’re suffixes, not bare words, so you might not have even noticed. They both mean “and”, but -vi is used for noun phrases, while -jyn is for verbs. To use them, you suffix them to each head word (noun for -vi, verb for -jyn) except the last one.

And then we have a few regular derivations we can point out:

  • -ölad (alternate form -ëlad) creates “mass” nouns for substances, collections, and things like that.

  • ur- negates adjectives; urburdos “impossible” is the antonym of burdos “possible”.

  • -önda (alternate form -ënda) creates abstract nouns from verbs: sim- “to speak”; simënda “speech”.

Vocabulary
Ardari English
banölad a people
bòte instead of
dabla land
drä then
èlyas heaven
filt- to know as, call by
ghinyas therefore
gwana stone
jan one
jeren there (far)
kamrul- to confuse, garble
kolrach language
kombra tower
kyus so that, because of
lagri word
lòkh whole
märyk- to propose, plan
moki a plain
nyas now
oprös other, otherwise
pamör mortar
pyurys pitch, tar
rejvet- to understand
säll east
sèlokyn mortal
simënda the act of speech
sun same
tapsin- to migrate
tèghdar- to descend
tsor(a/i) a god
tyolta brick
uq- to stop doing
urburdos impossible
utuwe- to scatter
warhan thorough
wizèl- to settle
zhi thus, in this way

Conclusion

So there you have it: the first full text in both Isian and Ardari. I hope you’re playing along at home, and you’re close to making your own translation of the Babel Text (or whatever you prefer).

Starting in the next part, we’ll be filling in the blanks that I had to leave in here. That should keep us occupied for a while. And then we’ll need some more words.

By this time next year, Isian and Ardari should be radically different. It’s my hope that 2017 will open with something far more…intense. By then, our conlangs will be well on their way to general usability. They won’t be complete, mind you, because when can you say a language is complete?

Let’s make a language – Part 10b: Relative clauses (Conlangs)

(Editor’s note: I wrote this two weeks ago. It’s only the calendar that put it out on Christmas Day.)

As I said before, I think relative clauses are hard to wrap your head around. Fortunately, once we know the basics, it’s much easier to put them into a conlang. Let’s do that now, with Isian and Ardari.

Isian relatives

Isian relative clauses always appear at the end of a noun phrase. That one’s pretty much the only non-negotiable part of the nominal grammar. But how do we make them? As it turns out, in one of two different ways, depending on what we’re relativizing.

For subjects, Isian uses a simple gap strategy. The only way you’ll know it’s a relative clause is by a special marker ke that goes before the verb. For example, “the man who saw me” translates as e sam ke cheres men. In a sense, ke functions almost like English that, as a complementizing particle, but it’s more tightly bound to the verb than the noun.

A couple more examples, using only old vocabulary:

  • es esher ke dalega e sush talar “the girls that live in the blue house”
  • ta almerat shes ke barda e ficha shimin “a wise woman who prays at the river”

Everything else that needs to be relativized works differently. (This, by the way, is an example of the accessibility hierarchy in action.) For these, Isian uses a resumptive pronoun. This is just a personal pronoun in the appropriate case and number, and it takes the place of the relativized argument. Changing our first example around, we would have e sam ke chereta im, meaning “the man I saw”. (Literally, this would be “the man I saw him”, which is ungrammatical in English.) Note that ke is still used, but im appears as the object, in a resumptive context.

More examples include:

  • e talar ke dalegan em i ed “the house where I live” (or “the house in which I live”)
  • lichacal ke rococan em ed “everything I have written”
  • es des ke an din fanama des mit “the things we can’t have”

Also, in this type of relative clause, Isian’s normal SVO word order isn’t quite as rigid. Resumptive pronouns can be fronted for emphasis, although they can’t come before ke and the verb. Actually, in these cases, the normal word order almost becomes VSO, with VOS a distinct alternative.

So, that’s the basic outline for Isian relative clauses. Compare that to the length of the last post, and you can see what I mean when I say that they’re hard to understand, but easier to implement. Now, let’s take a look at Ardari.

Ardari relatives

Grammatically speaking, this is one instance where Ardari is actually far simpler than Isian. It uses a full complementizing gap strategy throughout. The relative argument, whether subject, object, oblique, or genitive, is fronted and replaced by qa. The relative clause then slides into the noun phrase just before the head noun.

  • Subject: qa tyèketö wi reje sèdardös, “the children playing in the house”
  • Object: tura qa grätod ènglatö, “the long sword I made”
  • Oblique: qa chès tatyerod astitö, “the friend I danced with”
  • Genitive: sli qa me kyure yfilyod nälitö “the beautiful woman whose hand I held”

Postpositions are fronted, but not replaced, so they’re effectively “dangling”, although it’s impossible to end the sentence with one. (This should cause such a conflict in grammar pedants’ minds that it will shut them down for good.) The last two examples above illustrate this, with the postpositions chès “with” and me “of”; the latter is the way to make an Ardari genitive in a relative clause, since qa doesn’t have case forms. Putting these two in a “standard” form would give us astitö chès tatyerod “I danced with the friend” and slini nälinitö kyure yfilyod “I held the beautiful woman’s hand”, respectively.

Conclusion

There’s not much else to say, really. Again, the hard part is understanding relative clauses enough to know how to put them in your conlang. Putting them in turns out to be almost trivial in comparison. Who would have guessed?

Next time, we’ll look at the “other” kind of relative clause, more properly called the “adverbial” clause. Before that, though, next week will be special. See you next year!

Holidays: reality and fantasy

Today, for me, marks the winter solstice. (Officially, it happens just before 5AM tomorrow morning, going by UTC time. I’m in the US Eastern Time Zone, which is 5 hours behind that, so it’s a few minutes before midnight locally.) As the days grow shorter and the year runs out, thoughts naturally turn towards the holidays, of which there are so many right now. Christmas, of course, is only a few days away. Hanukkah isn’t too far behind us. New Year’s Day is on the horizon, bringing 2015 to a close. And that’s not counting the not-so-holy holidays this time of year, like Pearl Harbor Day (and the birthday of one of my uncles) back on the 7th or Boxing Day (and the birthday of a different uncle) on the 26th.

Indeed, in our modern, Western calendar, every month is chock full of holidays. (Except August, much to my brother’s delight; it’s totally bare, so his birthday is all by itself.) But that’s one culture, in one time, and nothing says that everybody has the same holidays. It’s common knowledge that Jews and Muslims don’t celebrate Christmas, for example, while Thanksgiving is an American tradition with no counterpart across the Atlantic. Many countries celebrate Independence Day, but only the USA has it on the Fourth of July.

And what about fictional cultures? What holidays do they have? Tolkien’s hobbits were good English folk, and they essentially used our calendar and our holidays, just with the Christianity filed off. That’s good enough for a lot of stories, but we might want to go deeper. To do that, we need to understand the origins of holidays.

For every season

For a “traditional” pre-industrial society, whether agrarian or hunter-gatherer, life is sustained directly by the earth itself. Food comes from nature, and it is the single most important facet of life. And food follows the seasons, whether the growing seasons of plants or the mating or hibernating or migrating seasons of animals. Life, living, is governed by the calendar. That’s where most of our traditional holidays come from. As it turns out, they might have different names, but almost every culture has a similar set.

Imagine an analog clock face. Now, imagine that this represents the year. Summer, the season with the highest temperatures, can go at the top, with the solstice at the 12 o’clock position. Winter, conversely, will be the low point: 6 o’clock. The spring and autumn equinoxes then fit in at 9 and 3, respectively. And time passes like this in its eternal cycles. Simple, right? Each of those four points I identified are important markers in the year that are recognized by most cultures. (Tropical cultures are a bit of an exception, since they don’t have the most obvious distinction of the seasons, the changing length of the night. But they can still tell the seasons by patterns in rainfall, winds, and the natural behavior of plants and animals.)

For a lot of places in the temperate zones, the spring (vernal) equinox marks the point in the year when temperatures are warm enough to make planting viable. In the same way, the autumnal equinox is a good sign that cold weather is moving in soon, and it’s time to start thinking about harvests and preparing for winter. Since temperate locales tend to show a big difference between hot and cold seasons, this is a very important part of the calendar. Freezing weather kills many plants, including most of those a pre-industrial society depends on for food. Planting too early and harvesting too late are both very real dangers that can, at the worst, lead to widespread famine. (Look up the Year Without a Summer for a fairly recent example of this.)

In a similar vein, the solstices are milestones in the calendar. Among older cultures, the winter solstice has been historically more important, whether as a time to look forward to the spring ahead or to celebrate the passing year. Summer, in temperate regions, is a relative time of plenty already, so it gets less attention. Besides, no one who lives a pastoral life looks forward to the lean times of winter.

So, for many cultures that haven’t reached the Industrial Age (where advances in technology allow food yields to increase faster than the population), these four times are some of the most likely suspects for holidays. And we can add to them four more: the midpoints between each pair. On our imaginary clock, those are at 1:30, 4:30, 7:30, and 10:30; on the calendar, they’re around the beginning of February, May, August, and November. Indeed, some calendars—the Celtic calendar is one example—use those to determine the seasons, while our familiar equinoxes and solstices become their midpoints.

Altogether, then, we have eight days that make obvious sense for agrarian holidays. On our calendar, roughly, they are: February 1, March 20, May 1, June 21, August 1, September 23, November 1, and December 21. And true enough, the Western world has seasons for just about all of them:

  • Early February: Groundhog Day is a modern spectacle that hearkens back to actual folk wisdom regarding the coming of spring. The Christian feast day of Candlemas probably replaced many of those “pagan” traditions. And America’s bloodsport of choice has its biggest day around this time, too: the Super Bowl.

  • Late March: Essentially everybody celebrates the first of spring. (If you’re a Celt, then that was in the last section, as Imbolc. Otherwise, it’s probably right here.) Most of the European rituals were subsumed into Easter, but the pagan origins are still evident. Look elsewhere in the world, though, and you’ll find planting holidays and end-of-winter feasts aplenty.

  • Early May: By the middle of spring, lots of flowers are blooming, and that’s the basic idea around these holidays. Nowadays, May Day celebrates workers in industrialized countries, but the floral connection still exists. The US has never really been a big May Day place, so Mother’s Day pops up here. It’s not a traditional festival-type holiday, though, so we’ll get to it later. The Celts, by the way, started counting summer here, calling it Beltane.

  • Late June: Again, we don’t really have a lot going on this time of year, but that wasn’t always the case. Midsummer was celebrated by plenty of cultures, and it’s a very big thing in northern Europe to this day. Christianity appropriated it as St. John’s Day, but find somebody in America who knows that. Of course, we have the nearby Fourth of July, so it’s understandable. Anyway, midsummer holidays tend to celebrate the long days, maybe even with bonfires that try to further drive back the night.

  • Early August: By August, summer is starting to run out, and fall is approaching. The earliest harvests start around this time, and the traditional Anglo-Saxon calendar marks August 1 as a “first harvest” festival for wheat crops, called Lammas (Lughnasa by the Celts). The timing doesn’t work everywhere, nor does it work for every crop, so not everybody has a harvest holiday around here, although they’ll have one somewhere.

  • Late September: Traditional harvest festivals tend to fall around the first of autumn. In other words, right here. The Harvest Moon is the full moon closest to the equinox, and its light can be seen as a blessing to those working the fields, giving them a little extra to see by. Harvest, of course, is a time of hard work, but also of feasting. Before modern food storage techniques, people had to eat what they could, lest it go to waste.

  • Early November: Celts have Samhain, Christians have All Saints’ Day, and children have Halloween. These are all connected, as the Church took over the pagan festival, then the people took over the holy feast. Some other cultures have something here, but this one isn’t that big a time to celebrate, as it means that winter is coming. Maybe if you’re a Stark…

  • Late December: In modern times, we’d see it as ending the year with a bang. For a lot of people (not just Christians, for that matter), Christmas is the holiday. But it has its pagan origins, too: traditional Yule and Roman Saturnalia. All of them have the same general idea, though. A feast to get through the long winter nights, a time to look forward to spring, a day to reflect on the year that was and the year that soon will be, all of that fits this time of year. So does gift-giving, that most popular of Christmas traditions. What better time to give to those in need, if not the shortest day of the year?

Getting religion

So that’s it for the agrarian calendar. Add religion to the mix, and things get hairy. For Christianity, it’s mostly simple, as the Church subsumed the pagan holidays into its own, sometimes only by changing their names. They did add some of their own, like Ash Wednesday or the feast of the Assumption, that don’t match up to the seasons. Judaism and Islam, which keep their own calendars, have their own holidays, like Hanukkah and Ramadan, and the same would be true even for fictional religions.

Here, it’s hard to give guidelines. Religious observances that aren’t anniversaries of known events can fall anywhere in the year. They can even be movable, and not in obvious ways: calculations of the date of Easter drove centuries of Christian astronomy. And those that are annual commemorations don’t necessarily need any connection to the actual date the event happened. After all, there isn’t even Biblical evidence that Jesus was born in December. (That he was crucified in spring is pretty solidly confirmed, however.)

My best advice is to think about the religion. What days are most important? Those will likely be the ones most celebrated. Then look at the rest of the calendar. People like feasts, but they don’t want too many too soon. That gets expensive. So the next most celebrated holidays will likely be those far from other holidays. It’s not an exact science—it doesn’t explain the American August drought—but it’s a good start.

Also, if your story involves a polytheistic religion, think about the different gods and their functions. Gods of agriculture and nature are going to be more tied to the seasons. Death and winter are often linked, for obvious reasons, so a death god might have a holiday in or near winter. Spring is seen as a time of love, fire goes with summer, and I’m sure you can find other relations.

Inventions

As states become more centralized, especially once industrialization comes about, the nature of holidays begins to change. Sure, the usual suspects are still there: harvest feasts, planting festivals, summer bonfires and winter gifts. But these are increasingly accompanied by a new set of holidays, and we should spend some time on them.

Many of our “secondary” holidays originally had a religious significance, largely stemming from the Catholic saints’ days. Valentine’s Day is one of these, though it also falls on the day of a Roman feast (Lupercalia) that had many of the same romantic connotations. Saint Patrick’s Day is another, but it’s also a “nationalist” holiday, with its strong Irish connection. For these, as for Christmas and Halloween, it’s a case of the secular overtaking the religious. Likewise, Thanksgiving originally had some religious overtones, but these are all but forgotten.

Other holidays are directly nationalist, and these obviously depend on the country. But they all have in common the idea of commemorating a person or group. In the US, for example, we have holidays to honor Christopher Columbus, Martin Luther King Jr., veterans (originally of World War I, but later expanded to all of them), mothers, fathers, workers, and presidents. The specifics will differ, but a fictitious country would likely have its own set of honored people. This would depend on history, societal norms, technological advancement, and the circumstances around the formation of that country, all of which are good topics for future posts.

Elsewhere

On other planets, the seasons still work the same way. A terrestrial planet with a year like Earth’s will have a natural calendar like Earth’s. The names and dates will be changed, but the broad outline will remain the same.

We don’t even know what kind of life can arise on less-familiar worlds, but it stands to reason that they’d have similar ideas about the calendar. Of course, around a red M star, a habitable world’s year only lasts a few weeks, so things will likely break down at this extreme. At the other end of the spectrum, habitable planets around F stars might have years 3 or more times that of ours, meaning longer, more extreme seasons. More holidays would appear in a longer calendar like this, if only to break up the monotony.

Now, a society spanning multiple worlds has a conundrum. Most of the holidays, at first, would be those of the homeworld. But colonies would soon become like nations on Earth, each developing their own set of observances (for the same reasons, no less). Almost all of these would be purely local, but some would rise in prominence, as St. Patrick’s Day has done here.

Conclusion

However you do it, holidays add flavor to a world. They’re an important part of life. They have been for thousands of years, and they will be as long as we continue to observe them.

Most of a culture’s holidays are going to come from its roots, and each will have a story. Some are religious, others entirely dependent on the whims of the seasons. A few started out as movements for political or social change, or to honor the leaders of such. And today, every day of the year has been claimed in the name of some organization. (My own birthday of October 16, for instance, is Boss’s Day, which would be great if I had employees. It’s also World Food Day and World Anesthesia Day, because of historical anniversaries.)

As I said before, most stories won’t need this level of detail. But it can find a place in worldbuilding, and it’s always good to have the answers to the kinds of questions you never thought to ask. So, consider this a gift. And whichever holiday you happen to be celebrating over the next week or so, I hope you enjoy it.

Let’s make a language – Part 10a: Relative clauses (Intro)

This time around, we’re going to look at what I think is one of the more confusing bits of a language: the relative clause. That is, it’s confusing in theory, as in understanding how it works. Implementing it in a conlang turns out to be a bit easier, but it marks a kind of turning point, in that we’re moving out of the simple grammatical concepts (like plurals or the past tense) and into the more complex world of phrase-level grammar. I guess you could even say this starts “Part 2” of the series.

It’s all relative

Relative clauses. What they are is right there in the name. First of all, they’re clauses, meaning that they are essentially self-contained phrases that have all the necessary parts to state a fact about something. (This is different from the prepositional phrases from last time, which can only really add information to an existing clause.) And second, relative clauses are relative. In other words, the new facts they provide somehow relate to something else.

That’s a grammatical definition, anyway. In English, what relative clauses are is fairly obvious: they are the phrases that we use to put more meaning in a sentence. (Conveniently enough, that last sentence ended with one.) Unlike an adjective phrase, a relative clause works more like a whole new sentence embedded in an existing one, except that one part of it refers directly to something in that existing sentence.

For example, let’s take a simple sentence with a relative clause: The nice man who lives next door has three big dogs. Okay, I’m not the best on example sentences, but it’ll work, and it doesn’t use any other grammar we haven’t already seen in the series. So what have we got? Well, let’s break it down. Starting at the end, we have a predicate phrase, has three big dogs, which contains a verb (has) and a noun phrase (three big dogs).

Those are nothing new, so we’ll ignore them completely and focus on the first half of the sentence, the subject phrase: the nice man who lives next door. Clearly, man is the head of this phrase, and the and nice are an article and adjective, respectively. And that leaves who lives next door, which is our relative clause. It’s formed almost like it could be a sentence, with its own verb (lives) and everything, but the subject is all wrong for that.

In a sense, we’ve combined two sentences. We have the main statement, the nice man has three big dogs, but we also want to clarify some things about this nice man, so we have another sentence, he lives next door. In both cases, we’re talking about the same man, and that’s the “hook” that lets us put the relative clause into the original statement.

Subjects and objects

In our example, the subject of the “outer” clause was the same as that of the relative clause. That doesn’t always have to be the case. In English, as in many languages, it’s possible to switch things around. You can also have, for instance, objects with attached relative clauses: I talked to the man who lives next door. Inside the relative clause, the man is still the subject, but on the outside, he’s the direct object. Similarly, the “relativized” part can be the object of its own clause (the man that I saw yesterday), or part of a possessive or other construction (the man whose dogs are always barking).

English, admittedly, makes all this a little unclear. In cased languages, it’s a lot easier to keep track of everything, and that’s one of the grammatical pedant’s arguments in still using whom for relativized objects. (Their opinion on sentences ending in a preposition comes into play here, too, because that comes from the different ways relative clauses are made in English and Latin. In Latin, you can’t “split” the preposition from the relative pronoun, like you can in English.)

Not every language allows all types of nouns to be relativized, though. There are a few different roles available, and it seems to be a linguistic universal that they fall into a naturally order, called the accessibility hierarchy:

  1. Subject
  2. Direct object
  3. Indirect object
  4. Oblique argument (English prepositional phrases)
  5. Genitive (where English would use whose)
  6. Comparative object (such as the people I am older than)

As the theory goes, if any one of these can’t be relativized, then nothing lower on the list can, either. In other words, any language that allows relative clauses at all is going to allow them for subjects, while one that doesn’t let you use them for objects won’t let you for genitives, either. English offers the full range, as do most of the “big” world languages, but that’s not always the case.

Those languages that don’t let you use the full hierarchy often have some way of accomplishing the same thing. There might be a special verbal voice (like the applicative or the antipassive), for example.

Other ways

Now, just because our language creates relative clauses a certain way by default (using a relative pronoun like “who”, “whose”, or “which”), doesn’t mean that’s the only way to do it. And that’s where things can get interesting. Indeed, English itself gives you a few options:

First off, you don’t actually need a relative pronoun; you can get by without one: the girls I saw outside has a relative clause with no pronoun. This one pops up in a lot of languages, and linguists refer to it as a gap strategy. The “gap” refers to where the relativized part of the sentence would go.

Second, you can use the gap strategy with a kind of linking particle, sometimes called a complementizer. This one is also an option in English, using that: the girls that I saw outside. This is common throughout the world, and it has become a kind of catch-all in English, much to the despair of some.

Both of the above alternatives carry less overt information than the relative pronoun typical of European languages. But we can go in the other direction, as well. We can add a resumptive pronoun, which is a regular personal pronoun that appears where the relativized argument would, as if we could say the girls that I saw them outside. (This one can appear in spoken English, when a speaker gets too bogged down in relative clauses. It’s happened to me plenty of times.) The resumptive pronoun can also be moved to the front of the relative clause in some languages, but that doesn’t change the core “method”.

A relative clause can also show up as some other kind of clause. Turkish has a nominalizing construction that would render our example as something like the girls of my seeing outside. Some languages of East Asia, conversely, use a genitive construction that would come out closer to the girls of I saw outside. Constructs like these tend to work best when independent words denote such meanings, rather than case affixes. If a language has a passive voice, that’s another possibility for relative clauses. Our running example in this section makes this one more cumbersome, but you might get something like the girls seen outside.

Finally, a few languages dispense with relativized clauses altogether. These have internally-headed clauses, where the clause that would be relative is simply inserted into the main sentence as-is. Using our original example sentence, this might come out in a literal translation as the nice man lives next door has three big dogs. (This kind shows up a little bit more often among the native languages of the Americas, but also in a few scattered locations elsewhere in the world.) A similar option is found in Hindi, which uses a reduced correlative word or phrase in the main clause, almost the opposite of the “relative pronoun” process of English. Our example sentence might be literally translated in this case as which nice man lives next door, that man has three big dogs.

Seeing all your relatives

That just about covers the largest category of relative clause, but it’s not the only one. We can also have something called a free relative clause, which isn’t really relative to much of anything. Wikipedia’s English example is I like what I see, which nicely illustrates this. Languages don’t have to allow this one at all, but many of them do; a different wording might be I like that which I see, which sounds very stilted in English, but more explicitly shows the grammar involved.

Another clause that “sounds” relative is the adverbial clause, something like when I came home. I mean, it looks like it’s a relative clause, right? It’s got when, and that’s in the same class as who and where, isn’t it? But it isn’t, not really. It is, however, the topic for the next part of the series, so we’ll leave that discussion for later.

Let’s make a language – Part 9b: Prepositional phrases (Conlangs)

Prepositional phrases, despite how important they are to expressing oneself in a language, don’t have all that much grammar. So we can combine both Isian and Ardari into one post, and we’ll even have time to add in a bit about adverbs while we’re at it.

Isian

Isian uses postpositions instead of prepositions, which is a change that might be hard to get used to. When they’re used to modify a noun, they usually follow it. If they’re supposed to modify a verb, then they’ll usually come at the end of a sentence, but not always. Sometimes, they’ll go right after the verb, and this signifies a greater emphasis on the phrase. It’s all in how you want to say it.

Simple nouns or noun phrases are easy to use with a postposition. Just put it after the phrase: e talar i “in the house”; sir mi fo “from my heart”. (I’ll show a whole bunch more at the end of the post.)

If we want to add in a bit of action to our phrase, then we have a special verbal marker, cu, that indicates something like an infinitive (“to go”) or a gerund (“going”): cu oca anos “without asking”. It’s not only used with postpositions, and we’ll see it pop up a few times later on.

Adjectives, as we saw a few posts ago, usually can’t occur without a noun in Isian. Well, here’s one of the cases where they can. Using an adjective with the special postposition hi (and only this one; it doesn’t work with others) creates a kind of adverb: ichi “beautiful”, ichi hi “beautifully”.

The postposition hi works with nouns, too: sam hi “manly, like a man”. The English translation shows an article, but Isian doesn’t need (and can’t use) one in this situation.

Ardari

As a head-final language, you’d expect Ardari to have postpositions, too, and you’d be right: tyèketö wi “in the house”.

The grammar here isn’t that much different from Isian. Noun phrases in postpositionals work in largely the same way, with one major difference. Remember that Ardari has case for its nouns. What case do we use for a postpositional phrase?

Usually, the accusative is the right answer. But a few postpositions require their nouns to appear in the dative. Some even change meaning based on the case of the noun. For example, wi used with the accusative means “in”, as we in tyèketö wi above. But use it in the dative (tyèkètö wi, note the vowel change), and the meaning becomes “into the house”. It’s a subtle difference, both in form and meaning, but it is indeed a difference.

Using a verb in a postpositional phrase isn’t that hard. The particle ky goes after the (uninflected) verb, and then the postposition goes after that: brin ky vi “while walking”; chin ky nètya “after going”.

Making an adverb out of a noun or phrase uses this same little word, but with the copula verb èll-: kone èll ky “like a man”. (You could say that èll ky is the Ardari adverb marker, but it’s not that simple.) Simple adjectives, on the other hand, can be used directly, so ojet can mean “sweet” or “sweetly”, depending on whether it modifies a noun or a verb: ojeta obla “sweet water”; ojet ajang ky “singing sweetly”.

The list

As promised, here’s a brief list of some of the most common English prepositions and their closest equivalents in Isian and Ardari.

English Isian Ardari
above apay aj
across sos ori
after eb nètya
against ansir eka
around oto òs
at ni äl
before pane jo
behind biso ab
below didal ku
by hoy sy
for ir da
from fo tov
in i wi
in front of ihamo kulyi
into si wi +DAT
of o me
on od oj
onto ores oj +DAT
out of way zho +DAT
through aju tutwi
to/toward es lim
until nobes nyon
with was chès
without anos achèsu

Where “+DAT” appears after a word in the Ardari column, it means that postposition requires a dative noun. Other than that, there’s not much else to say about the table.

Next up

To close out the year, we’ll be looking at relative clauses. Once that’s done, we should have enough of the blanks filled in that 2016 can begin with a bang. Since I write these beforehand, I won’t be taking off for Christmas or New Year’s, because those posts will already be done and waiting.

Colonization and the New World

It’s common knowledge that the Old World of Europe, Asia, and Africa truly met the New World of the Americas in 1492, when Columbus landed in the Caribbean. Of course, we now know that there was contact before that, such as the Vikings in Newfoundland, about a thousand years ago. But Columbus and those who followed him—Cortés, Pizarro, de Soto, Cabot, and all those other explorers and conquerors Americans learn about in history class—those were ones who truly made lasting contact between the two shores of the Atlantic.

Entire volumes have been written over the last five centuries about the exploration, the conquest, the invasion of the Americas. There’s no need to repeat any of it here. But the subject of the New World is one doesn’t seem to get a lot of exposure in the world of fiction, with the notable exception of science fiction. And I think that’s a shame, because it’s an awfully interesting topic for a story. It’s full of adventure, of gaining knowledge, of conflict and warfare. Especially for American writers (not limited to the United States, but all of North and South America), it’s writing about the legacy we inherited, and it’s odd that we would rather tell stories about the history of the other side of the ocean.

Written by the victors

Of course, one of the main reasons why we don’t write many stories about exploration and colonization is political. We know a lot about the Spaniards and Englishmen and Frenchmen that discovered (using that term loosely) the lands of America. We have written histories of those first conquistadors, of those that came after, and of the later generations that settled in the new lands. We don’t, however, have much of anything from the other side.

A lot of that is due to the way first contact played out. We all know the story. Columbus discovered his Indians (to use his own term), Cortés played them against each other to conquer them, and smallpox decimated them. Those that survived were in no position to tell their tale. Most of them didn’t have a familiar system of writing; most of those written works that did exist were destroyed. And then came centuries of subjugation. Put that all together, and it’s no wonder why we only have one side of the tale of the New World.

But this already suggests story possibilities. We could write from one point of view or the other (or both, for that matter), setting our tale in the time of first contact or shortly after, in the upheaval that followed. This is quite popular in science fiction, where the “New World” is really a whole new world, a planet that was inhabited when we arrived. That’s the premise of Avatar, for example.

Life of a colony

Colonization has existed for millennia, but it’s only since 1492 that it becomes such a central part of world history. The Europeans that moved into the Americas found it filled with wonders and dangers. For the Spanish, the chief problem—aside from the natives—was the climate, as Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean mostly fall into the tropical belt, far removed from mid-latitude Spain.

The English had it a little better; the east coast of the United States isn’t all that different from England, except that the winters can be harsher. (This was even more the case a few hundred years ago, in the depths of the Little Ice Age.) It’s certainly easier to go from York to New York than Madrid to Managua.

No matter the climate, though, colonists had to adapt. Especially in those times, when a resupply voyage was a long and perilous journey, they had to learn to live off the land. And they did. They learned about the new plants (corn, potatoes, tomatoes, and many more) and animals (bison and llamas, to name the biggest examples), they mapped out river systems and mountain chains. And we have reaped the benefits ever since.

Building a colony can be fun in an interactive setting; Colonization wouldn’t exist otherwise. For a novel or visual work, it’s a little harder to make work, because the idea is that a colony starts out exciting and new, but it needs to become routine. Obviously, if it doesn’t, then that’s a place where we can find a story. Paul Kearney’s Monarchies of God is a great series that has a “settling new lands” sequence. In the science fiction realm of colonizing outer space, you also have such works as Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars (and its colorful sequels).

Terra nullius

Whenever people moved into new land, there was always the possibility that they were the first ones there. It happened about 20,000 years ago in Alaska, about 50,000 in Australia, and less than 1,000 in Hawaii. Even in the Old World, there were firsts, sometimes even in recorded history. Iceland, for example, was uninhabited all the way through Roman times. And in space, everywhere is a first, at least until we find evidence of alien life.

Settling “no man’s land” is different from settling in land that’s already inhabited, and that would show in a story with that setting. There are no outsiders to worry about. All conflict is either internal to the colonists’ population or environmental. That makes for a harder story to write, I think, but one more suited to character drama and the extended nature of books and TV series. It doesn’t have to be entirely without action, though, but something like a natural disaster would be more likely than war.

This is one place where we can—must—draw the distinction between space-based sci-fi and earthly fiction or fantasy. On earth (or a similar fictitious world), we’re not alone. There are animals, plants, pests everywhere we go. We have sources of food and water, but also of disease. In deep space, such as a story about colonizing the asteroid belt, there’s nothing out there. Nothing living, at least. Settlers would have to bring their own food, their own water, their own shelter. They would need to create a closed, controlled ecosystem. But that doesn’t leave much room for the “outside” work of exploration, except as a secondary plot.

Go forth

I’m not ashamed to admit that I could read an entire book about nothing but the early days of a fictional colony, whether in the Americas or on an alien planet. I’ll also admit that I’m not your average reader. Most people want some sort of action, some drama, some reason for being there in the first place. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

But let’s look at that question. Why does the colony exist at all? The Europeans were looking for wealth at first, with things like religious freedom and manifest destiny coming later on. The exploration of space appears to be headed down the same path, with commercial concerns taking center stage, though pure science is another competitor. Even simple living space can be a reason to venture forth. That seems to be the case for the Vikings, and plenty of futuristic stories posit a horribly overcrowded Earth and the need to claim the stars.

Once you have a reason for having a colonial settlement, then you can turn to its nature. The English made villages and towns, the French trading posts. Antarctica isn’t actually settled—by international agreement, it can’t be—but the scientific outposts there point to another possibility. If there are preexisting settlements, like native cities, then there’s the chance that the colonists might move in to one of them instead of setting up their own place. That’s basically what happened to Tenochtitlan, now known as Mexico City.

Colonies are interesting, both in real history and in fiction. They can work as settings in many different genres, including space opera, fantasy, steampunk (especially the settling of the Wild West), and even mystery (we still don’t know what really happened at Roanoke Island). Even just a colonial backdrop can add flavor to a story, giving it an outside pressure, whether by restless natives or the cold emptiness of space. A colony is an island, in a sense, an island in a sea of hostility, fertile ground for one’s imagination.

Let’s make a language – Part 9a: Prepositional phrases (Intro)

We’ve made quite a bit of progress with our languages since the beginning. They’ve got nouns, pronouns, verbs, and adjectives. We’ve given them plenty of grammar to connect these bits and turn them into sentences. But those sentences are pretty bland. And that’s because there’s no real way for our conlangs to express anything but the most basic of semantic relationships: subject and object. To remedy that, we’re going to talk about a new type of phrase, the prepositional phrase.

English, for example

Prepositional phrases are everywhere you look in English. That last sentence, in fact, ended with one: “in English”. This type of phrase isn’t absolutely necessary to the grammatical “core” of a sentence. It’s extra information that fills in the blanks, giving us more detail about a situation. Prepositional phrases are the way we can learn wheres and whens and hows about something. They’re filler, but that’s exactly what we need.

Looking at English—we’ve got a whole post full of examples, so there’s no reason not to—we can see the general structure of a prepositional phrase. It starts with a preposition, naturally enough, and that’s really the head of the phrase. Prepositions are those words like “in”, “of”, or “below”; they can specify position, location, time, possession, and about a hundred other ideas that are impossible (or just cumbersome) to express with only a verb, subject, and object.

Besides the preposition, the rest of the prepositional phrase is, well, a phrase. It’s usually a noun phrase, but English allows plenty of other options, like gerunds (“in passing“) and adverbs (“until recently“). In theory, there’s nothing stopping a language from letting whole sentences be put into prepositional phrases (“after I came home“), but phrases like that are technically a different kind that we’ll see in a future post. For now, we’ll stick with the more noun-like examples.

Changing it up

English isn’t the only (or even the best) example of how to do prepositional phrases. Other languages do things differently. So, let’s take a look at how they do it.

The first thing to say is that this post’s whole premise is a lie. You don’t need prepositions. You don’t have to have a word that precedes a noun phrase to give more information about a sentence. No, it’s actually a bit more common (according to WALS Chapter 85) to put the preposition after the noun phrase. In that case, it’s not really proper to call it a preposition anymore; pre-, after all, means “before”. So linguists call these words postpositions. Japanese, for instance, uses postpositions, and any anime lover knows of の (no). Thus, “preposition” is technically a misnomer, and the more general term (which we won’t use here) is adposition.

Even rarer types exist, too. There’s the inposition, which pops up in a few languages. It goes somewhere in the middle of the noun phrase. The circumposition has bits that go on either side of the phrase, and this (so Wikipedia says) appears in Pashto and Kurdish. It’s sort of like the French phrasing seen in je ne sais pas. And then there are a few oddballs that don’t seem to have any of these, using verbs or case markers or something like that as stand-ins.

What can fit in the “phrase” part of “prepositional phrase” varies from one language to the next, as well. Noun phrases are let in pretty much everywhere. Not every language has adverbs, though, unless you’re of the belief that any word that doesn’t fit in another class is automatically an adverb. Gerunds aren’t ubiquitous, either. And, of course, languages can go the other way, allowing more possibilities than English.

A note on adverbs

We haven’t really discussed adverbs much, and there’s a good reason: nobody can agree on just what an adverb really is. Sure, it’s easy to say that adverbs are to verbs what adjectives are to nouns, but that doesn’t help much. If you look at it that way, then a prepositional phrase can also be an adverbial phrase. Similarly, some languages—Irish, for example—create regular adverbs by means of a prepositional phrase, their equivalent to English “-ly”. On the other hand, it’s entirely possible for a language to give its adjectives the ability to function as adverbs, as in Dutch.

For a conlang, adverbs are a hard thing to get right. It’s easy to be regular, much harder to be naturalistic. Esperanto mostly goes the regular route, with its productive -e suffix, but there are a few exceptions like hodiau “today”. The best advice I can give here is to have a little bit of both. Have a regular way to derive adverbial meaning from adjectives, but also have a few words that aren’t derived.

In conclusion

How your conlang handles prepositions isn’t something I can tell you. I can give you a few pointers, though. First, there’s a tendency for head-final languages (SOV word order, adjectives preceding nouns, etc.) to use postpositions. This is by no means universal, but it’s something to think about.

And the end of that last sentence brings up another point that often gets overlooked. Can you end a sentence with a preposition? You can in English. The only reason it’s considered “bad” is because of the influence of Latin, which doesn’t allow it. Clearly, a postposition can end a sentence, by its very nature, but the waters are murkier for those that come before. When we get to relative clauses in the next part of the series, the question will be more relevant, but it might be good to have an answer when that time comes.

Other things to consider are what types of phrases can be put in a preposition, where they fit in a sentence (before the verb, after it, at the end, or wherever), case marking (some languages have prepositions that require their nouns to go in a specific case, while case-heavy languages can go with a smaller set of prepositions), person marking (a few languages require this on the preposition), and the relation between prepositional and other types of phrases. And, of course, the main question: do you have prepositions at all?

Once you’re through all that, you’ve greatly increased the expressive power of your language. Not only can you tell what happened and who did it, but now you can specify where, when, why, and how.

Novel Month 2015 – Day 26, early morning

And…that’s a wrap.

First of all: Happy Thanksgiving! Second of all: it’s done!

That’s right, the story is finished, and with 4 days to spare. Never thought I could do that, but now I know I can. I’d like to do some nice stats and all that other stuff, but I’m done with writing for a while, and I’m going to take a much-needed break. One filled with turkey and dressing and potatoes and pie and all that other wonderful food that only comes around once a year.

Regular posts should start back up next week. December 1 is a Tuesday, and I don’t normally post on that day, so we’ll get back in the swing of things on Wednesday the 2nd. Of course, that’s assuming that these software updates I’ve been putting off for a month don’t go haywire. Debian Testing is a harsh mistress.

This session’s word count: 2,629
Final word count: 54,030

Novel Month 2015 – Day 25, early morning

After midnight, so the day changes.

All that’s left is the last third of Chapter 8. It’s basically an epilogue, setting things up for Episode III, whenever I decide to write that. (Maybe I’ll start next month.)

I’m going to bed for the night. When I wake up, there’s only one thing left to do: Finish the drill.

This session’s word count: 880
Total word count: 51,401