Release: The Shape of Things

Thanks to my aunt (who gave me the idea for this one), I’ve got a new novel to get you in the Halloween spirit. It’s called The Shape of Things, and it’s a paranormal mystery with urban fantasy elements. But don’t think it’s something way “out there”. You know I don’t write that. Anyway, here’s the blurb for it:

The world is stranger than you know.

Cameron Weir hunts the paranormal. It’s a hobby, a second job, a nice diversion from the rigors of life. Whether it’s ghosts or monsters or aliens, he’ll be there to find the answer. And that answer is never any of those things, because he well knows that monsters don’t exist.

But something is out there. Something lurks in the night. What started as a simple call with a mundane explanation turns out to lead to a much deeper mystery. Glowing eyes in the dark. Strange, animal-like sounds echoing through the night. And then the most monstrous of all: a dead body. In the midst of such weirdness, Cameron questions his own rationality, and that leads him on a trail that will take him to the most fabled monster of all: Bigfoot.

For now, it’s only on my Patreon. Later on, I’ll look into putting it on the Kindle store or elsewhere. If I do, I’ll write up a longer post describing it. Until then, the description above and the post over on Patreon should suffice.

Borrowing from natural languages

One of the hardest parts about creating a language has to be the vocabulary. At least, that’s always the hardest for me. Maybe you’re different, but I doubt it’s easy for anybody, unless you’re doing one of those “engineered” languages where an algorithm does all the work for you.

Anyway, since creating words is so difficult, and since we do have to have them to, well, make a language, it’s only natural that we look for shortcuts. One of those is the random word generator, as you know, and I’ve spoken on that subject before. Today, however, we’ll look at a different method: borrowing. Specifically, I’m talking about borrowing from an existing language, a real language.

Can it work?

Borrowing from natural languages is fairly straightforward, but it’s easy to go wrong. Obviously, if you just take a bunch of English words wholesale, then you’re not making a separate language. You’ll end up with something closer to a pidgin instead: English words stuffed into foreign grammar. And that’s probably not what you want.

So we need a better strategy, but which one you want to use depends on your goal. Which words you want to borrow will go a long way towards defining the “feel” of your conlang. If you’re taking a bunch of old Anglo-Saxon roots, that’s going to create something that looks much different from a language that only borrows modern technical terms like “internet” or “photovoltaic”.

Also, remember that languages don’t always borrow a whole linguistic paradigm. They’ll tend to take only a root (which might not be the actual root) and derive native terms from there. So even if you borrow “computer”, that’s no guarantee that you’ll be borrowing “computers”, “computing”, and “computation”, too. If you do, it’ll look less natural, because that doesn’t often happen in the real world. And you do want this to look realistic, don’t you?

Details

Clearly, the absolute best way of borrowing from natural languages would be to let your conlang stay in contact with the “source” language (e.g., English) for generations, allowing the loans to build up organically. But we don’t have that kind of time. How can we simulate that evolutionary process in a hurry?

Well, there are a lot of ways. For the modest goal of creating a natural-looking conlang backed by a plausible culture, following the guidelines I’ve mentioned in my “Let’s Make a Language” series will help. Rather than send you to read all of those, though, I’ll boil them down to their essence right here.

First, think about how existing languages borrow words. It’s not at random. It’s usually to fill a need, such as an imported food or a new invention. It could be political or religious in nature, as well, as the large number of Latin and Greek borrowings related to Christianity will attest. But it’s not often for things we already have words for. You don’t see common, basic vocabulary items like “sea” or “dog” being borrowed, because there was never any need. Yes, some specific subsets might come from loans (e.g., “maritime”, “canine”), but these are the exception, not the rule.

Second, languages are only going to borrow from those they have contact with. English today is everywhere, but that wasn’t always so. Japanese got most of its loans from Chinese to start, while Quechua (in South America) took mostly from Spanish. Borrowings, especially in pre-modern times, are going to come first from neighbors, second from conquering or conquered peoples, and last from a “lingua franca”. That does require you to locate your conlang in the real world, but it allows for greater verisimilitude, which is why you’re reading this post in the first place.

Finally, the culture of the conlang itself will determine what it borrows. Initially, it will move to fill gaps in its lexicon, and what those gaps are can create a different feel for the language. To create one contrived example, imagine a small culture undergoing a push for equal rights for women. It’s been mostly male-dominated up to now, and the vocabulary reflects that. But it has contact with French, which has gendered occupational titles. So it might borrow a few feminine forms here and there, or maybe even the -eur/-euse distinction as a whole. If the movement goes far enough, the existing (native) masculine words may be reinterpreted as gender-neutral forms, giving rise to a new dichotomy. Then, as more modern occupations become available (to men and women alike), the language would borrow terms for them, then modifying them to fit the new standard.

The same principle works pretty much everywhere. A perceived need is filled by taking from a nearby or well-known language that has already filled them. It works in all fields, under any circumstances. You can even see it at work today, among smaller natural languages. Look around, and you’ll see how many have borrowed, in some form, “telephone”, “television”, “automobile”, and a whole host of others. Of course, they wouldn’t need those words if they didn’t have those concepts, but that’s neither here nor there.

In other wor(l)ds

The same principle works in non-modern settings. You’d have to do a lot more work to come up with plausible borrowings from, say, Sumerian or Etruscan, but we know they provided loanwords to their neighbors. Remember, though, that older times imply less connectivity, less globalism. (Not always, as the Roman Empire proves, but it’s a good rule of thumb.) That also means more dialects, which can provide a bit more variety in your loans.

You can even generalize this to other worlds, though this one’s a lot more difficult. At some point, you’re making a whole “conworld”, rather than just a conlang, and that’s a different article for a different time. Still, the basic principle of “borrowing to fill in the gaps” works anywhere.

For a conlang intended to be spoken by a hypothesized real-world people, take from those languages that are supposed to be their neighbors. A culture hidden in an inaccessible corner of the Amazon isn’t going to start getting European loans until 1492, at the earliest. More likely, it’ll take some time for influence to diffuse that far, possibly even centuries. Likewise, central Africa isn’t going to get much Chinese influence until almost right now.

In a way, this whole process is reminiscent of the creation of an auxiliary language. But it still retains the artistic style, the creative flair of an a priori conlang. It’s almost like an intermediate form, you might say. A happy medium.

Modern C++ for systems, part 1

In today’s world, there are two main types of programming languages. Well, there are a lot of main types, depending on how you want to look at it, but you can definitely see a distinction between those languages intended for, say, web applications and operating systems. It’s that distinction that I want to look at here.

For web apps (and most desktop ones), we have plenty of options. JavaScript is becoming more and more common on the desktop, and it’s really the only choice for the web. Then we’ve got the “transpilers” bolted on top of JS, like TypeScript, but those are basically the same thing. And we can also write our user applications in Python, C#, or just about anything else.

On the other side—and this is where it gets interesting, in my opinion—the “systems” side of the equation doesn’t look so rosy. C remains the king, and it’s a king being assaulted from all sides. We constantly see articles and blog posts denigrating the old standby, and wouldn’t you know it? Here’s a new, hip language that can fix all those nasty buffer overflows and input-sanitization problems C has. A while back, it was Go. Now, it’s Rust. Tomorrow, it might be something entirely different, because that’s how fads work. Here today, gone tomorrow, as they say.

A new (or old) challenger

C has its problems, to be sure. Its standard library is lacking, the type system is pretty much a joke, and the whole language requires a discipline in coding that really doesn’t mesh with the fast and loose attitudes of today’s coders. It’s also mature, which hipsters like to translate as “obsolete”, but here that age does come with a cost. Because C has been around so long, because it’s used in so many places, backwards compatibility is a must. And that limits what can be done to improve the language. Variable-length arrays, for instance, are 18 years old at this point, and they still aren’t that widely used.

On the other hand, “user-level” languages such as Python or Ruby tend to be slow. Too slow for the inner workings of a computer, such as on the OS level or in embedded hardware. Even mobile apps might need more power. And while the higher-level languages are more expressive and generally easier to work with, they often lack necessary support for lower-level operations.

Go and Rust are attempts at bridging this gap. By making languages that allow the wide range of operations needed at the lowest levels of a system, while preventing the kinds of simple programming errors a C compiler wouldn’t even notice, they’re supposed to be the new wave in system-level code. But Go doesn’t have four decades of evolution behind it. Rust can’t compile a binary for an 8-bit AVR microcontroller. And neither has the staying power of the venerable C. As soon as something else comes along, Rust coders will chase that next fad. It happened with Ruby, so there’s no reason it can’t happen again.

But what if I told you there’s a language out there that has most of C’s maturity, more modern features, better platform support1, and the expressive power of a high-level language? Well, if you didn’t read the title of this post, you might be surprised. Honestly, even if you did, you might still be surprised, because who seriously uses C++ nowadays?

Modern world

C++ is about as old as I am. (I’m 33 for the next week or so, and the original Cfront compiler was released in 1985, so not too much difference.) That’s not quite C levels of endurance, but it’s pretty close, and the 32-bit clocks will overflow before most of today’s crop of lower-level languages reach that mark. But that doesn’t mean everything about C++ is three decades out of date.

No, C++ has evolved, and never so much as in 2011. With the release of that version of the standard, so much changed that experienced programmers consider “Modern” C++ to be a whole new language. And I have to agree with them on that. Compared to what we have now, pre-2011 C++ looks and feels ancient, clunky, baroque. Whatever adjectives your favorite hater used in 2003, they were probably accurate. But no more. Today, the language is modern, it’s fresh, and it is much improved. So much improved, in my opinion, that it should be your first choice when you need a programming language that is fast, safe, and expressive. Nowhere else can you get all three.

Why not Java/C#?

C++ often gets compared to Java and C#, especially when talk turns to desktop applications. But on the lower levels, there’s no contest. For one, both Java and C# require a lot of infrastructure. They’re…not exactly lightweight. Look at Android development if you don’t believe me on the Java side. C# is a little bit better, but still nowhere near as efficient in terms of space.

Second, you’re limited in platform support. You can’t very well run Java apps on an iPhone, for instance, and while Microsoft has opened up on .NET in the past few years, it’s still very much a Windows-first ecosystem. And good luck getting either of them on an embedded architecture. (Or an archaic one.)

That’s not to say these aren’t good languages. They have their uses, and each has its own niche. Neither fits well for our purposes, though.

Why not Go/Rust?

Go, Rust, and whatever other hot new ideas are kicking around out there don’t suffer from the problem of being unfit for low levels. After all, they’re made for that purpose, and it’d be silly to make a programming language that didn’t fill its intended role.

However, these lack the maturity of C++, or even Java or C#. They don’t have the massive weight of history, the enormous library of documentation and third-party code and support. Worse, they aren’t really standardized, so you’re basically at the mercy of their developers. Tech companies have a reputation for short attention spans, which means you can’t be sure they won’t stop development tomorrow because they think they’ve come up with something even better. (Ask me about Angular.)

Why C++?

Even if you think some other language works better for your system, I’d still argue that you should give Modern C++ a shot. It can do essentially everything the others can, and that’s not just an argument about what’s Turing-complete. With the additions of C++11, 14, and 17, we’re not talking about the “old” style anymore. You won’t be seeing screen-long type declarations and dizzying levels of bracket nesting. Things are different now, and C++ even has a few features lacking from other popular languages. So give it a shot.

I know I will. Later on, I hope to show you how C++ can replace both the old, dangerous C and the new, limiting languages like Rust. Stay tuned for that.


  1. Strictly speaking, Microsoft doesn’t have a C compiler, only a C++ one. MSVC basically doesn’t track new versions of the C standard unless they come for free with C++ support. 

Otherworld talk 5

The second half of Chronicles of the Otherworld has begun. You might say it’s all downhill from here, except…well, it’s really not. We haven’t hit the highest notes of this song quite yet. But we have seen a new episode released (The Bonds Between Us), so that’s a good excuse for a new chat about this setting from the man who created it. This time around, I want to take a deeper look at the “local” culture of the Otherworld, the Virissea. Personally, I feel they’re one of my greatest creations. To think, they started off as nothing more than a background element for their language.

The language

That one’s not even an exaggeration. As I’ve said numerous times, the initial seed for the Otherworld series came when Stargate Universe was canceled. Nobody was doing good “exploration” sci-fi anymore, or even exploration fantasy. (Monarchies of God is a great series in that vein, by the way.) Now, that’s not to say I thought I could do better, but I knew I could do better than nothing. Since nothing was what I had, how could I lose?

More importantly, though, the Otherworld setting started out as a kind of language playground. The details of the native tongue (as well as quite a few others in the setting) predate most other notes by months. And the one I called “Virisai” was first on the list.

As languages go, it’s nothing remarkable, and I intended that from the very start. This isn’t an alien language, because these aren’t aliens. That goes hand-in-hand with the “alternate timeline” setup. And yet I didn’t really want a typical Amerind language, because a lot of those are horrendously complex. There’s no way a bunch of college students could become anywhere near fluent in one of those in less than three months. But, I figured, since I had so much “alternative” time to work with, I could plausibly say that this is a whole new language family, as well, one that didn’t follow its brethren in development. In other words, it branched off too early to pick up some of the more convoluted aspects of American indigenous languages.

Beyond that, the language is fairly straightforward. It has a few hangups, a few unexpected complexities, and I’ve found ways to work some of those into the narrative. (Mostly, this comes in Jeff’s chapters, as he’s the linguist, though Amy occasionally notes one.) But I do intend it to be a “natural” constructed language. It’s meant to be spoken, written, read. In fact, I do have a translated Babel Text lying around somewhere, and I’ve considered doing other works when I have the free time.

The culture

The culture of the Virissea, like their language, shares that “same but different” quality. These people may look like your typical Native American, but they are certainly not American. They don’t fit the realities or the stereotypes. They’re there own thing, and most of the culture shock is about dealing with that other thing.

For those in the midst of the story, I’ve intentionally designed the culture to be not outrageously dissimilar from anything on Earth. The local Virissea are monotheistic, for instance, though there’s a strong hint of ancestor worship in there, too, and a fairly complex mythology regarding the otherworldly Altea, who supposedly helped to create the world after their own was destroyed in some previous cataclysm. As they looked different from the Virissea, those members of the expedition who look the most outlandish are seen instead as these mythical people: Jeff, Jenn, Ayla, Sara. Lee and Ramón, by contrast, get treated as some kind of prodigal sons, while Damonte is something else entirely.

Other parts of the culture likewise follow this trend. These people don’t have human sacrifices, but they do have some strange taboos and rituals. They may not play the Mayan ball game, but they’ve got one of their own. Their science isn’t nearly as advanced as ours, so advanced technology is seen as magic instead (following Clarke’s Third Law), but that’s okay, because they already have a mythos full of magic. They just fit computers and solar panels into that, and go on about their day.

That, I think, is my primary goal with this culture. Too often, we assume that modern Americans meeting a more “primitive” people will be treated as either gods or devils because of our technology, attire, beliefs, and general otherness. And to be fair, some members of the expedition get the godly treatment, but they don’t intentionally play to it—with one notable exception.

But there can be a third road, where we’re neither demonized nor canonized. Think about it. If you’ve never seen a tablet computer before, but you get told stories every week of a legendary hero who carried around a magic spellbook, it’s not that great a leap to equate the two. Either one is so far beyond you that it’s almost required by Occam’s Razor. But that doesn’t mean the guy carrying that tablet is a god, not when you’re also taught that there’s only one of those.

In other words, no matter how different the Virissea are, they’re still people. Humans. They have a civilization, a culture, and they’re desperately trying to fit these newcomers into their world without breaking too much. In other words, exactly what I would want to do if presented with a representative of an advanced alien race.

The others

And that makes a good segue into matters of race. For the Otherworld, the subject is a bit tricky. Everyone in it (except for our intrepid heroes) descends from the original inhabitants of the Americas. Yet some of them are…different. I’ll leave the whys for later, because I think the simple idea is enough to get started.

I did intend on having multiple human subspecies in the Otherworld from the start. (That is totally not me ripping off The Dagger and the Coin, except when it is.) And I even made them fit the classic fantasy stereotypes. The Lyssea, who show up again in this episode, are a reinterpretation of elves. The Kaldea beating down Ayla’s door fill the “dwarf” role. Even last episode’s Arassea work, as they started off in my head as vaguely orc-like. That’s not to say these races are their fantasy inspirations. Oh, no. But it’s a perfect excuse for some people—particularly a certain character very drawn to fantasy literature—to see them as such.

All told, there are ten total races in the Otherworld, if you count the Altea. (And if you don’t count the modern Earthlings of the expedition.) Some of them can interbreed; some of them would rather not. Each has its own culture, language, and outlook, and I use that to set up quite a few interesting plotlines. The Arassea slavery angle, for one, or the Kaldea and their cabal-like protection of their technology. On top of that, there are racial tensions, and even some outright racism. Why? Because the Otherworld is not a utopia. It’s imperfect, just like ours, and part of the story’s development is peeling back those layers to find the imperfections.

The upcoming

That’s all for this installment, but the chronicles will keep coming. Next up is Situational Awareness, which is my favorite episode of the first season. I loved writing it, I love reading it, and I hope you’ll enjoy it as much as I do. Until then, have fun in either world, and be sure to look at my other stories.

Release: The Bonds Between Us (Chronicles of the Otherworld 5)

We’re on our way now. Today marks the release of the fifth episode of Chronicles of the Otherworld. Five out of eight. You might call it the second half, or the third quarter. Whatever you like, it’s clear that the story is moving towards its conclusion.

Every action has consequences. Some have far more than others.

No man or woman in the expedition ever claimed to be perfect, but now their choices over the past six weeks may be coming back to haunt them. Because not everyone in this other world is friendly to outsiders. And they aren’t all quite as primitive as one might think.

As outlaws threaten their city, their home, the time to act may be fast approaching. For a month and a half, the expedition has called this land home. Now, terror threatens that home, and they must rise to the occasion. For the target is one of their own.

The series is still an exclusive, so you’ll have to head over to my Patreon page for access, but a little $3 pledge gets you the first four episodes, too, so what have you got to lose? And keep watching for Episode 6, Situational Awareness, coming October 24.

Future past: Electricity

Electricity is vital to our modern world. Without it, I couldn’t write this post, and you couldn’t read it. That alone should show you just how important it is, but if not, then how about anything from this list: air conditioning, TVs, computers, phones, music players. And that’s just what I can see in the room around me! So electricity seems like a good start for this series. It’s something we can’t live without, but its discovery was relatively recent, as eras go.

Intro

The knowledge of electricity, in some form, goes back thousands of years. The phenomenon itself, of course, began in the first second of the universe, but humans didn’t really get to looking into it until they started looking into just about everything else.

First came static electricity. That’s the kind we’re most familiar with, at least when it comes to directly feeling it. It gives you a shock in the wintertime, it makes your clothes stick together when you pull them out of the drier, and it’s what causes lightning. At its source, static electricity is nothing more than an imbalance of electrons righting itself. Sometimes, that’s visible, whether as a spark or a bolt, and it certainly doesn’t take modern convenience to produce such a thing.

The root electro-, source of electricity and probably a thousand derivatives, originally comes from Greek. There, it referred to amber, that familiar resin that occasionally has bugs embedded in it. Besides that curious property, amber also has a knack for picking up a static charge, much like wool and rubber. It doesn’t take Ben Franklin to figure that much out.

Static electricity, however, is one-and-done. Once the charge imbalance is fixed, it’s over. That can’t really power a modern machine, much less an era, so the other half of the equation is electric current. That’s the kind that runs the world today, and it’s where we have volts and ohms and all those other terms. It’s what runs through the wires in your house, your computer, your everything.

Theory

The study of current, unlike static electricity, came about comparatively late (or maybe it didn’t; see below). It wasn’t until the 18th century that it really got going, and most of the biggest discoveries had to wait until the 19th. The voltaic pile—which later evolved into the battery—electric generators, and so many more pieces that make up the whole of this electronic age, all of them were invented within the last 250 years. But did they have to be? We’ll see in a moment, but let’s take a look at the real world first.

Although static electricity is indeed interesting, and not just for demonstrations, current makes electricity useful, and there are two ways to get it: make it yourself, or extract it from existing materials. The latter is far easier, as you might expect. Most metals are good conductors of electricity, and there are a number of chemical reactions which can cause a bit of voltage. That’s the essence of the battery: two different metals, immersed in an acidic solution, will react in different ways, creating a potential. Volta figured this much out, so we measure the potential in volts. (Ohm worked out how voltage and current are related by resistance, so resistance is measured in ohms. And so on, through essentially every scientist of that age.)

Using wires, we can even take this cell and connect it to another, increasing the amount of voltage and power available at any one time. Making the cells themselves larger (greater cross-section, more solution) creates a greater reserve of electricity. Put the two together, and you’ve got a way to store as much as you want, then extract it however you need.

But batteries eventually run dry. What the modern age needed was a generator. To make that, you need to understand that electricity is but one part of a greater force: electromagnetism. The other half, as you might expect, is magnetism, and that’s the key to generating power. Moving magnetic fields generate electrical potential, i.e., current. And one of the easiest ways to do it is by rotating a magnet inside another. (As an experiment, I’ve seen this done with one of those hand-cranked pencil sharpeners, so it can’t be that hard to construct.)

One problem is that the electricity this sort of generator makes isn’t constant. Its potential, assuming you’ve got a circular setup, follows a sine-wave pattern from positive to negative. (Because you can have negative volts, remember.) That’s alternating current, or AC, while batteries give you direct current, DC. The difference between the two can be very important, and it was at the heart of one of science’s greatest feuds—Edison and Tesla—but it doesn’t mean too much for our purposes here. Both are electric.

Practice

What does it take to create electricity? Is there anything special about it that had to wait until 1800 or so?

As a matter of fact, not only was it possible to have something electrical before the Enlightenment, but it may have been done…depending on who you ask. The Baghdad battery is one of those curious artifacts that has multiple plausible explanations. Either it’s a common container for wine, vinegar, or something of that sort, or it’s a 2000-year-old voltaic cell. The simple fact that this second hypothesis isn’t immediately discarded answers one question: no, nothing about electricity requires advanced technology.

Building a rudimentary battery is so easy that it almost has to have been done before. Two coins (of different metals) stuck into a lemon can give you enough voltage to feel, especially if you touch the wires to your tongue, like some people do with a 9-volt. Potatoes work almost as well, but any fruit or vegetable whose interior is acidic can provide the necessary solution for the electrochemical reactions to take place. From there, it’s not too big a step to a small jar of vinegar. Metals known in ancient times can get you a volt or two from a single cell, and connecting them in series nets you even larger potentials. It won’t be pretty, but there’s absolutely nothing insurmountable about making a battery using only technology known to the Romans, Greeks, or even Egyptians.

Generators a bit harder. First off, you need magnets. Lodestones work; they’re naturally magnetized, possibly by lightning, and their curious properties were first noticed as early as 2500 years ago. But they’re rare and hard to work with, as well as probably being full of impurities. Still, it doesn’t take a genius (or an advanced civilization) to figure out that these can be used to turn other pieces of metal (specifically iron) into magnets of their own.

Really, then, creation of magnets needs iron working, so generators are beyond the Bronze Age by definition. But they aren’t beyond the Iron Age, so Roman-era AC power isn’t impossible. They may not understand how it works, but they have the means to make it. The pieces are there.

The hardest part after that would be wire, because shuffling current around needs that. Copper is a nice balance of cost and conductivity, which is why we use it so much today; gold is far more ductile, while silver offers better conduction properties, but both are too expensive to use for much even today. The latter two, however, have been seen in wire form since ancient times, which means that ages past knew the methods. (Drawn wire didn’t come about until the Middle Ages, but it’s not the only way to do it.) So, assuming that our distant ancestors could figure out why they needed copper wire, they could probably come up with a way to produce it. It might not have rubber or plastic insulation, but they’d find something.

In conclusion, then, even if the Baghdad battery is nothing but a jar with some leftover vinegar inside, that doesn’t mean electricity couldn’t be used by ancient peoples. Technology-wise, nothing at all prevents batteries from being created in the Bronze Age. Power generation might have to wait until the Iron Age, but you can do a lot with just a few cells. And all the pieces were certainly in place in medieval times. The biggest problem after making the things would be finding a use for them, but humans are ingenious creatures. They’d work something out.

Let’s make a language, part 27c: Religion (Ardari)

Although I’ve been intentionally vague on the whereabouts of Ardari, it’s definitely less attached to European culture than Isian. To that end, it has few true borrowings for religious terms, instead relying on reinterpreted roots from the native belief system. Angels and devils, for instance, are firar and ghemar. A priest is an ekòna—but modern reformation has led to the creation of a feminine variant for what was once a masculine-only term: ekòni.

The Ardari priesthood might not have been a bastion of equality, but the faith itself was. Most supernatural beings in the old polytheistic system came in male and female forms, so there are pairs like tsora and tsori, or fira and firi, and these stand alongside the neuter terms used as the default.

That’s not to say that Ardari doesn’t import religious terms from other languages. It does, but it uses native words for most of the basic concepts. The sole loan in the list below is tyorymat “religion”, a conceptual term that only came in once Ardari speakers of eras past needed to talk about religion as distinct from faith. Other borrowings are made instead to describe concepts specific to one religion, such as santös “saint” (from Latin sanctus), èklecha “church” (from Latin ecclesia), or mazhid “mosque” (from Arabic masjid).

Word List

  • angel: fir (or gendered fira/firi)
  • devil: ghem
  • fairy: lyun (or gendered lyuna/lyuni)
  • faith: mitraz
  • ghost: qoj
  • god: tsor (or gendered tsora/tsori)
  • heaven: èlyas
  • hell: uldall
  • holy: mirs
  • magic: bräz
  • priest: ekòna (also modern feminine form ekòni)
  • religion: tyorymat (distant borrowing from theo-)
  • ritual: plan
  • sacred: grès
  • soul: jull
  • to bless: konye-
  • to curse: dakya-
  • to pray: nyes-

Future past: Introduction

With the “Magic and Tech” series on hiatus right now (mostly because I can’t think of anything else to write in it), I had the idea of taking a look at a different type of “retro” technological development. In this case, I want to look at different technologies that we associate with our modern world, and see just how much—or how little—advancement they truly require. In other words, let’s see just what could be made by the ancients, or by medieval cultures, or in the Renaissance.

I’ve been fascinated by this subject for many years, ever since I read the excellent book Lost Discoveries. And it’s very much a worldbuilding pursuit, especially if you’re building a non-Earth human culture or an alternate history. (Or both, in the case of my Otherworld series.) As I’ve looked into this particular topic, I’ve found a few surprises, so this is my chance to share them with you, along with my thoughts on the matter

The way it works

Like “Magic and Tech”, this series (“Future Past”; you get no points for guessing the reference) will consist of an open-ended set of posts, mostly coming out whenever I decide to write them. Each post will be centered on a specific invention, concept, or discovery, rather than the much broader subjects of “Magic and Tech”. For example, the first will be that favorite of alt-historians: electricity. Others will include the steam engine, various types of power generation, and so on. Maybe you can’t get computers in the Bronze Age—assuming you don’t count the Antikythera mechanism—but you won’t believe what you can get.

Every post in the series will be divided into three main parts. First will come an introduction, where I lay out the boundaries of the topic and throw in a few notes about what’s to come. Next is a “theory” section: a brief description of the technology as we know it. Last and longest is the “practice” part, where we’ll look at just how far we can turn back the clock on the invention in question.

Hopefully, this will be as fun to read as it is to write. And I will get back to “Magic and Tech” at some point, probably early next year, but that will have to wait until I’m more inspired on that front. For now, let’s forget the fantasy magic and turn our eyes to the magic of invention.

Release: The Final Sacrifice

And thus it ends. The concluding part of The Linear Cycle, titled “The Final Sacrifice”, has now been released to all. With that, the story has reached its final chapter.

For this one, the action goes back to Midra, back to where it all began. But everything is different now, thanks to the Touched. The Valtian Empire is a hollow shell of its former self, and its neighbors can see that. The kingdom of Esteca, sensing weakness, wants to strike at its heart. With its population decimated, its best weapon neutralized, can the empire survive?

This part ties up all the loose ends placed by the previous five installments. Dusk is on the walls, defending his home once again. Kalle Varens leads that defense, in what may be his final command. His wife Hella watches and waits, guiding the refugees who are streaming in to the capital in hopes of a better shot at survival. Porter still seeks a way to recover what he has lost, though he wonders how far he’ll have to go this time. Princess Leliya must convince her husband’s people to come to the aid of her half-brother. And Tod, the boy who never knew magic until he found it in his blood…

This one was hard. It really was. In the end, I had to break my word count, going over 20,000 ever so slightly, but I feel that was worth it. This one’s back to the action, but with that drama underneath, and the ending might be one of the wildest things I’ve ever written.

As with the other parts of The Linear Cycle, the link above will take you to the post here. You can also check it out on Patreon or pick it up for the low price of $1.99 on the Kindle Store. However you do it, I hope you enjoy this finale, and I thank you for coming with me on this epic journey.

Let’s make a language, part 27b: Religion (Isian)

Isian, as we have seen, has borrowed more than a few terms from European languages. That shows up again in the matter of religion. Its speakers are mostly Christian, thanks to an earlier period of conversion and reformation. Before that, however, they had a polytheistic faith similar to many of their neighbors.

Remnants of this still show through in terms like alam “god”, which stands alongside the Latinate loan Domo “Lord”. The latter refers specifically to the God of Christianity, while the former, native, word can be used for any deity. It’s also more amenable to derivation, such as alanchi “demigod” or alamel “godly”. Domo on the other hand, is essentially fixed in form.

Other borrowings include engel “angel” and sacrel “sacred”, though the second is more of a calque. The word helin, meaning “ghost” or “spirit”, may also be related to the Germanic root underlying English “holy”. And it’s clear that priests have always been considered “holy men”, as the Isian word for them is a direct compound: chisam.

Word List

  • angel: engel (borrowed, possibly from Germanic)
  • devil: nukh
  • fairy: su
  • faith: sahe
  • ghost: helin
  • god: alam (Christian God usually trans. as Domo)
  • heaven: timiro
  • hell: hasilo
  • holy: chi
  • magic: ampen
  • priest: chisam (lit. “holy-man”)
  • religion: caltir
  • ritual: ronden
  • sacred: sacrel (borrowed from Latin/Romance)
  • soul: mit
  • to bless: leya
  • to curse: murgo
  • to pray: barda