Writing – Page 38 – Prose Poetry Code

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

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

Head to toe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Internal affairs

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

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

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

Actions of the body

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

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

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

The body and taboo

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

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

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

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

In your language

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

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

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

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

Next time around

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

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

Weird (but human) languages

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

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

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

Eye of the beholder

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

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

Phonology

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grammar

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

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

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

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

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

Lexicon

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

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

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

The outer limits

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

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

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

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

The time of day

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

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

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

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

Human time

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

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

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

Next up

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

Word List

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

Relative terms

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

Units of time

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

Calendar

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

Miscellaneous

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

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

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

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

Keeping time

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

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

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

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

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

The order of events

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

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

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

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

Word List

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

Relative terms

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

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

Units of time

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

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

Calendar

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

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

Miscellaneous

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

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

Writing World War II

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

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

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

Time is running out

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

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

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

Give it a shot

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

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

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

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

Diverging parallels

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

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

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

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

Fun, fun, fun

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

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

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

Time may be relative, or an illusion, or even on our side. However you think of it, it’s an important part of any culture. And culture is reflected in language, so every language is going to have ways of talking about time. Unlike many of the possible semantic categories, time is so vital that it’s often reflected directly in the grammar, as verb tense. But this part of the series will focus on how time affects a language’s lexicon. And to do that, we must first look at the calendar.

Timekeeping

Humans have been recording time for thousands upon thousands of years. After hunting and preparing food, some of the oldest tools we’ve found are instruments for recording the passage of time. This obsession has continued to the present day, where we’re treated to stories of new atomic clocks so precise and so accurate that they’ll only lose a second or two throughout the rest of our planet’s lifetime.

But let’s go back to those earlier days, because that’s when language was born. Our distant ancestors didn’t have atomic clocks or wristwatches or anything of the sort. They did, however, have the sun and the moon. Those celestial bodies aren’t perfect timekeepers, but they’re good enough for coarse measurement. Later, as civilizations arose, better methods of marking time became a necessity. “Better” in this sense means more accuracy (kept time is closer to “real” time) and precision (counting in smaller and smaller divisions).

The bigger units are mostly astronomical in nature. A day is the time it takes the Earth to rotate once on its axis. (Later, we figured out the difference between solar and sidereal days.) It doesn’t take much to realize that a day has two major components, day and night—some languages have different words for the two senses of day, but many don’t. The boundary periods can also be important: in English, we have dawn and dusk, plus the collective twilight. We’ve divided the two halves into finer portions: morning, afternoon, evening, etc. And a couple of times, noon and midnight, get special mention.

The month, as its name suggests, is loosely based on the orbit of the moon or, to put it in “ancient” terms, its phases. It averages a little over 30 days for us in the West, but other calendars do things differently. And the moon brings its own host of vocabulary. It waxes and wanes, and it can appear as new or full, crescent or gibbous.

Longer periods of time are based (unwittingly, at first) on the Earth’s orbit. The seasons come about from a planet’s tilt. We’re used to four of these, winter, summer, spring, and fall or autumn, but some cultures divide things differently. In the tropics, the temperature difference between the seasons isn’t so great, and rainfall is the deciding factor, so a culture in that region might speak of wet and dry seasons instead. Likewise, the monsoon is regular enough that places where it appears might consider it its own season. And non-tropical cultures will undoubtedly mark the equinoxes and solstices.

One full orbit of a planet around its star is a year, of course, and that also marks a full circuit of the seasons. Longer periods of time usually come from derivation. For decimal-based cultures, something akin to the decade, century, and millennium will likely appear. Non-decimal languages would instead develop similar terms for a dozen years, a gross, or whatever is appropriate. In addition, a few terms for larger amounts of time are based on the human body, such as generation and lifetime, while others (era, epoch) are historical in nature.

Switching to the other side of the coin, it wasn’t too hard to divide the day into hours. The specific number of them is culture-dependent, and this is a case where decimal numbers failed. Subdividing the hours was harder; talking minutes and seconds as anything other than theoretical requires the technology to measure them. But those terms are old enough to show that theory was around long before practicality. Our modern intervals of milliseconds and smaller come from the metric system, but moment and instant have a longer history, and heartbeat stands as a “legacy” unit of time.

The order of things

The units of time are important for precision, but just as useful are the nebulous terms of relative time. We can speak of the past, present, and future, for instance, and other cultures (especially if their languages have different tense systems) will have their own scheme. Something close to aspect also enters the vocabulary. Things or states can be temporary or permanent. They can begin and end, pause and continue. Some actions occur at regular intervals.

When something happens relative to when it should is another rich area of vocabulary. Someone can be early or late or, more rarely, on time (also prompt or timely). We can hurry to catch up with time, or we can wait if we’re ahead.

Mixing relative and absolute time also creates more possibilities for words. An event can take place today or tomorrow, but it also could have been yesterday. Or we can be more specific: phrases such as this morning and last night could be represented as a single lexeme in some languages.

Naming the calendar

The week is an outlier, and its vague definition illustrates that fact. It’s seven days for us, but that’s not a constant throughout history or the world. Anything between about four and ten days has been a “week” somewhere and at some point. It’s purely cultural, and it probably originated as a way to organize markets and the like.

With so few “moving parts”, it’s a simple thing to give each day of the week its own name. We did, after all. In English, we’ve got one named after the sun, another after the moon, four for Germanic gods of ages past, and somehow Saturn found his way in there. Other languages do things differently, though. The Romance theme is Roman gods, obviously, with a shout-out to Christianity on Sundays. Some cultures instead use a rather boring scheme of “first-day”, “second-day”, and so on. Still others can be more pragmatic, naming, for example, the market day as a compound meaning “market-day”.

Months can also have their own names. Our Western list is a mess, mixing in gods (January), emperors (July and August), and numbers (October, misnumbered because of a quirk of history). But that’s evolution for you. Tempting as it is to go all agglutinative here, other forces may intervene.

Specific days of the year can also get their own names: the holidays. These are highly sensitive to cultural aspects, especially religion. Some of them, though, become important enough to be lexicalized. Today, we talk of valentines in February and Easter eggs, Thanksgiving turkeys, and Christmas trees. Those are all noun-noun compounds that have become fixed in form and meaning over time, and they wouldn’t mean anything outside the context of our Western calendar.

Other units of time probably won’t be named, unless the culture has a reason for doing so. We have a few phrases like wee hours, witching hour, and leap year, but those are transparent compounds. We also give numerical or descriptive names to decades, centuries, and other periods: the Nineties, the 20th Century, the Middle Ages. These, however, aren’t lexical.

Making time

In a conlang, you’ll most likely want to start with the “relative” time terms, like before and future. Those are easy, and they cover enough ground to give your language a good amount of “meat” in its vocabulary. Some of them may even suggest themselves from the grammatical elements, such as tense and aspect markers or prepositions. Or you could go the other way, deriving new terms from the basic words of time. That’s how English got before, to name one example.

The “absolute” words are harder, because you need to develop at least a rudimentary outline of a culture. You need to understand the people who speak your language. Obviously, an auxlang has the easiest time here, since it will just copy the sensibilities of its “host” cultures. Artlangs need a bit more care. (If they’re on alien worlds, then they need a lot more care, but that’s a different post.) Remember who you’re dealing with, too. Ancient herders aren’t going to have a word for “nanosecond”, and a far-future spacefaring race might not use, say, weeks.

Finally, don’t forget that many words that seemingly have no connection to the passage of time are, in fact, derived from temporal terms. It’s thanks to time that we have words like tide, daisy, periodical, perennial, and menstrual, among many others.

Into the future

Next time (pardon the pun), we’ll be looking at how Isian speaks about time. Then, it’s Ardari’s turn. Beyond that, the future is less certain. But time and tide wait for no man, so we’ll get to them eventually.

Summer reading list 2016

In the US, Memorial Day is the last Monday in May, and it is considered the unofficial start of summer. Time for the kids to get out of school, time to fire up the grills or hit the water. Although the solstice itself isn’t for three more weeks, late May feels like summer, and that’s good enough for most people.

But there’s one hint of school that stays with us through these next glorious weeks of peace: the summer reading list. Many will remember that awful thing, the educational system’s attempt to infringe on a child’s last refuge. I hated it, and you probably did, too. The books they chose were either awful (Ayn Rand’s Anthem) or tainted by association with school (Into Thin Air, by Jon Krakauer). Just like the reading assignments of the other nine months, the summer reading list seemed designed to suck all the enjoyment out of a book.

Now that we’ve outgrown it, things are different. We no longer need to read to please others. But that doesn’t mean we stop reading. No, we instead choose our own path.

So here’s a bit of a challenge for you. Read three books between now and Labor Day (September 5). That’s roughly one a month, so it shouldn’t be too hard. There won’t be any reports due, so you don’t have to worry about that, either. Remember, adults can read for fun rather than work.

It wouldn’t be a challenge if there weren’t rules, so here they are:

You have to read three (3) complete books between May 30 and September 5 of this year. (For following years, it’s the last Monday in May to the first Monday in September.) Giving up halfway doesn’t get you partial credit, so make sure you pick something you can stand to finish.
One (1) of these books should be nonfiction. It can be anything from history to self-help, but it has to be real. (Historical fiction doesn’t count for this, by the way.)
If you’re an aspiring fiction writer, then one (1) of the books must not be from your preferred genre. For example, a fantasy writer should read a non-fantasy book, perhaps sci-fi or a modern detective story. The idea is to branch out, expand your horizons.
Graphic novels count, but comic books don’t. The distinction is subtle, I’ll admit. I’d say a comic book is a short periodical, usually in magazine-style binding, while a graphic novel is a longer work presented in the same way as a text-only work. You can be your own judge, as long as you’re honest with yourself.

And that’s it!

Rhyme in conlangs

I’ve been doing posts on here for a year now, and there’s been one glaring omission. The name of the place is “Prose Poetry Code”, but we have yet to see any actual posts about poetry. So let’s fix that by looking at how we can add a poetic touch to a constructed language by using that most famous of poetic devices: rhyme.

You most likely already know what rhyme is, so we can skip the generalities. It’s all around us, in our songs, in our video game mysteries, in our nursery rhymes and limericks and everywhere else you look. Do we need a definition?

The sound of a rhyme

From a linguistic perspective, we probably do. Yes, it’s easy to point at two words (“sing” and “thing”, for instance) and say that they rhyme. But where’s the boundary? Rhyme is a similarity in the final sounds of words or syllables, but we have to define how close these sounds must be before they’re considered to rhyme. Do “sing” and “seen” rhyme? The English phonemes /n/ and /ŋ/ aren’t too far apart, as any dialectal speech illustrates.

So there’s your first “dimension” to rhyme. Clearly, there are limits, but they can be fluid. (Poetry is all about breaking the rules, isn’t it?) Most languages would allow inexact rhymes, as long as there’s enough of a connection between the sounds, but how much is necessary will depend on the language and its culture. You can go where you want on this, but a good starting point is the following set of guidelines:

A sound always rhymes with itself. (This one’s obvious, but there’s always allophonic variation to worry about.)
Two consonants rhyme if they differ only in voice. (You can add aspiration or palatalization here, if that’s appropriate for your conlang.)
Two vowels rhyme if they differ only in length. (Again, if this is a valid distinction.)
A diphthong can rhyme with its primary vocalic component. (In other words, /ei/ can rhyme with /e/ but not /i/.)
Nasal consonants rhyme with any other nasal. (This is a generalization of the explanation above.)

This isn’t perfect, and it’s especially not intended to be a list of commandments from on high. Feel free to tweak a bit to give your conlang its own flavor. And if you’re using an odder phonology, look for the contrasts that make it distinct.

Where to begin, where to end

Another thing to think about is how much of a syllable is considered for a rhyme. In Chinese, for instance, it’s basically everything but an initial consonant. English, with its complicated phonological and syllabic systems, allows more freedom. Clusters can count as simplified consonants or stand on their own. Reduced or unstressed vowels can be omitted, as can consonants: “’twas”, “o’er”.

Once again, this is creativity at work, so I can’t tell you what to do. It’s your decision. Really, the only “hard” rule here is that the initial part of a syllable rarely, if ever, has to match for a rhyme. Everything else is up for grabs.

With longer words, it’s the same way, but this is a case where different languages can do things differently. Stress patterns can play a role, and so can the grammar itself. To take one example, Esperanto’s system for marking word class by means of a change in final vowels is interesting from a mechanical point of view, but it’s awful for rhyming poetry. One could argue that all nouns rhyme, which is…suboptimal. (A better option there might be to require rhyming of the penultimate syllable, since Esperanto always stresses it, ignoring the “marker” vowel altogether.)

Going in a different direction, it’s easy to see that a language with CV syllables—think something in the Polynesian family here—will tend to have very long words. With a small set of phonemes, there aren’t too many combinations, and that could lead to too much rhyming. Maybe a language like that requires multiple matching syllables, but it might just discard rhyme as a poetic device instead.

And then there’s tone. I don’t speak a tonal language, so I’ve got little to go on here, but I can see a couple of ways this plays out. Either tone is ignored for rhyming, in which case you have nothing to worry about, or it’s important. If that’s true, then you have to work out which tones are allowed to rhyme. For “level” tones (high, low, medium), you could say that they have to be within one “step”. “Contour” tones may have to end at roughly the same pitch. Why the end, you may ask? Because rhyming is inherently tied to the ends of syllables.

Different strokes

As rhyme is tied to the spoken form of a language, it will be affected by the different ways that language is spoken—in other words, dialects.

One good example of this in English is “marry”. Does it rhyme with “tarry”? Most people would say so. What about “gory”? Probably not. “Berry”? Ah, there you might have a problem. Some dialects merge the vowels in “marry” and “merry”, while most other (American) ones don’t.

Rhyming verse is made to be spoken, recited, chanted, or sung, not merely read, so this is not a theoretical problem. It’s important for anyone writing in a natural language with any significant dialectal variation. Nor is it limited to slight changes in vowel quality. What about English /r/? It disappears at the end of words in England, but not America…at least in speech. Except for country music, most singers tend to drop the R because it sounds better, which has the side effect of creating more opportunities to rhyme.

Of course, for a conlang, you probably don’t have to think about dialects unless you’re specifically creating them. Still, it might be useful to think about for more “hardcore” worldbuilding.

Sing a song

Rhyming isn’t everything in poetry. It’s not even the most important part, and many types of verse get by just fine without it. But I started with it for two reasons: it’s the easiest to explain, and it’s the simplest to build into your conlangs. In fact, you’ve probably already got it, if you look close enough. (If you’re using random generation to create your words, however, you may not have enough similar words to get good rhymes. That’s where author fiat has to come in. Get in there and make them.)

If you don’t care for rhymes, that’s not a problem. Others do, and if you’re making a language for other people to speak, such as an auxlang, you have to be prepared for it. Poetry is all about wordplay, and creativity is an unstoppable force. Whether song or spoken word, people will find ways to make things work.

On writing systems

Most conlangers work with text: text files, wordlists, and the like. It’s very much a visual process, quite the opposite of “real” languages. Yes, we think about the sound of a language while we’re making it, but the bulk of the creation is concerned with the written word. It’s just easier to work with, especially on a computer.

Writing, of course, has a long history in the real world, and many cultures have invented their own ways of recording the spoken word. For a conlang, however, the usual form of writing is a transcription into our own alphabet. Few go to the trouble of creating their own system of writing, their own script. Tolkien did, to great effect, but he was certainly an outlier. That makes sense. After all, creating a language is hard enough. Giving it its own script is much more effort for comparatively little payoff.

But some are willing to try. For those who are, let’s see what it takes to create writing. Specifically, we’ll look at the different kinds of scripts out there in this post.

Alphabet

The alphabet is probably the simplest form of script, from the point of view of making one. You don’t really need an example of an alphabet—unless this post was translated into Chinese while I wasn’t looking, you’re reading one! Still, our familiar letters aren’t the only possibility. There’s the Greek alphabet, for example, as well as Cyrillic and a few others.

Alphabets generally have a small inventory of symbols, each used (more or less) for a single phoneme. Obviously, English is far from perfect on that front, but that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The principle stands, even if it’s stretched a bit. None of our 26 letters stands for a full syllable, right?

That’s why alphabets are so easy to make, and why they’re (probably) the most common form of writing for conlangs. You only need a few symbols—and there’s nothing saying you can’t borrow a few—and you’re all but done. Writing in the script you make can be as simple as exchanging letters for glyphs.

Abjad and abugida

These two foreign terms name two related variations on the alphabet. The abjad is a script where only consonants are directly written; vowels are represented by diacritics, if at all. That’s the basic system used by Arabic and many of its cousins, as in “ةباتك” (kitāba). Note that Arabic isn’t a “pure” abjad, though. The third letter (reading right-to-left) stands for the long a, while the final a has its own letter. As with English, that’s fine. Nobody’s perfect.

The abugida is similar to the abjad, but it does mark vowels. Unlike an alphabet, this is usually with some form of diacritic or as an “inherent” vowel, but it’s always there. Many of the various languages of India use this type of script, such as the Devanagari used by Hindi: लेखन (lekhan). This particular word has three “letters”, roughly standing for l, kh, and n. The vowel a (actually a schwa) is implicit, and it’s omitted at the end of words in Hindi, so only the first letter needs a diacritic to change its vowel. Once more, the scheme isn’t perfect, but it works for a few hundred million people, so there you go.

Syllabary

Alphabets, abjads, and abugidas all have one thing in common: they work on the level of phonemes. That makes intuitive sense, particularly in languages with complex phonotactics. When there are hundreds of thousands of possible syllables, but only a few dozen individual phonemes, the choice is clear. (That hasn’t stopped some crazy people from trying to make a syllabary for English, but I digress.)

The syllabary, by contrast, gives each syllable its own symbol. Realistically, to use a “pure” syllabary, a language almost has to have a very simple syllabic structure. It works best with the CV or CVC languages common to Asia and Oceania, and that’s probably why the most well-known syllabary comes from that region, the Japanese kana: てがき (tegaki).

A syllabary will always have more symbols than an alphabet (about 50 for Hiragana, plus diacritics for voicing), but not an overwhelming number of them. Syllabaries made for more complicated structures usually have to make a few sacrifices; look at the contortions required in Japanese to convert foreign words into Katakana. But with the right language, they can be a compact way of representing speech.

Featural

A featural alphabet is another possibility, sitting somewhere between an alphabet and a syllabary. In this type of script, the letter forms are phonemic, but they are constructed to illustrate their phonetic qualities. Korean is the typical example of a featural script: 필적 (piljeog). As you can see (hopefully; I don’t seem to have the right font installed on this computer), each character does encode a syllable, but it’s obviously made up of parts that represent the portions of that syllable.

Featural alphabets might be overrepresented in conlanging, because they appeal to our natural rationality. Like agglutinative languages, they’re almost mechanical in their elegance. They only require the creation of an alphabet’s worth of symbols, but they give the “look” of a more complex script. If you like them, go for it, but they’re probably rare in the world for a reason.

Logographic

Finally, we come to the logographic script. In this system, each glyph stands for a morpheme or word, with the usual caveat that no real-world system is perfectly pure. Chinese is far and away the most popular logographic script these days: 写作 (xiězuò). Chinese characters have also been borrowed into Korean, Japanese, and other neighboring languages, but they aren’t the only logograms around. Cuneiform, hieroglyphs (Egyptian, Mayan, or whatever), and a few other ancient scripts are logographic in nature.

It should be blatantly obvious what the pros and cons are. The biggest downside to logograms is the sheer number of them you need. About half of Unicode’s Basic Multilingual Plane is composed of Chinese characters, and that’s still not enough. Everything about them is harder, whether writing, inputting, or even learning them. In exchange, you get the most compressed, most unambiguous script possible. But the task might be too daunting for a conlanger.

The mix

In truth, no language falls neatly into one of the above categories. English is written in an alphabet, yes, but we also have quite a few logograms, such as those symbols on the top row of your keyboard. And with the advent of emoji, the logographic repertoire has grown exponentially. Similarly, Arabic has alphabetic properties, Japanese uses Chinese logograms and Latin letters in addition to its syllabic kana, and the phonetic diacritics used by languages such as German are essentially featural.

For your conlang, the style you choose is just that: a style. It’s an artistic choice. Alphabets (including abjads and abugidas) are far easier. Syllabaries can work if you have the right language, or are willing to play around. Logograms require an enormous effort, but they’re so rare that they might be interesting in their own right. And featural systems have the same “logical” appeal as conlangs like Lojban. Which you choose is up to you, but a natural script won’t be limited to one of them. It will borrow parts from the others.

Creating a script for a conlang can be a rewarding task. It’s not the type of thing to undertake lightly, however. It’s a lot of work, and it takes a bit of artistic vision. But you wouldn’t be making a language if you weren’t something of an artist, right?

Let’s make a language – Part 15b: Color terms (Conlangs)

So we’ve seen how real-world languages (or cultures, to be more precise) treat color. Now let’s take a look at what Isian and Ardari have to say about it.

Isian

Isian has a fairly short list of basic color terms. It’s got the primary six common to most “developed” languages, as follows:

Color	Word
white	bid
black	ocom
red	ray
green	tich
yellow	majil
blue	sush

We’ve actually seen these before, in the big vocabulary list a few parts back, but now you know why those colors were picked.

There are also three other “secondary” terms. Mesan is the Isian word for “gray”, and it runs the gamut from black to white. Sun covers browns and oranges, with an ochre or tawny being the close to the “default”. In the same way, loca is the general term for purple, pink, magenta, fuchsia, and similar colors. Finally, mays and gar are “relative” terms for light and dark, respectively; gar sush is “dark blue”, which could be, say, a navy or royal blue.

All these words are adjectives, so we can say e sush lash “the blue dress” or ta ocom bis “a black eye”. Making them into nouns takes the same effort as any other adjective, using the suffix -os. Thus, rayos refers to the color of red; we could instead say rayechil “red-color”.

Derivation is also at the heart of most other Isian color names. Compounds of two adjectives aren’t too common in the language, but they are used for colors. In all cases, the “primary” color is taken as the head of the compound. Some examples include:

raysun, a reddish-brown or red-orange; some hair colors, like auburn, might also fit under this term.
majiltich, a yellow-green close to chartreuse.
tichmajil, similar to majiltich, but more yellow, like lime.
locasush, a mix of blue and purple, a bit like indigo.

Most other colors are named after those things that have them. “Blood red”, for instance, is mirokel (using the adjectival form of miroc “blood”). Halakel is “sky blue”, and so on. As with English, many of the names come from flowers, fruits, woods, and other botanical origins. We’ll look at those in a later post, though.

Ardari

To look at Ardari’s color terminology, we’ll need to work in stages, as this uncovers a bit of the language’s history. First, it seems that Ardari went a long time with four basic colors:

Color	Word
white	ayzh
black	zar
red	jor
green	rhiz

Yellow (mingall) and blue (uswall) got added later, likely beginning as derivations from some now-lost roots. (The sun and the sky are good bets, based on what we know about real-world cultures.)

Next came a few more unanalyzable roots:

Color	Word
brown	dir
orange	nòrs
purple	plom
pink	pyèt
gray	rhuk

That gives the full array of eleven that many languages get before moving on to finer distinctions. Add in wich “light” and nyn “dark”, and you’re on your way to about 30 total colors.

Ardari doesn’t use compounds very often, so most of the other color terms are derived in some fashion. Two good examples are the similar-sounding wènyät “gold” and welyät “sky blue”. These started out as nothing more than adjectival forms of owènyi “gold” and weli “sky”, turned into adjectives by the -rät suffix we met not too long ago, and worn down a bit over time.

Another color word, josall, is an example of a more abstract or general term. It covers very light colors like beige and the pastels. It’s lighter even than wich nòrs or wich jor would be, but with more color than pure white. The word itself probably derives from josta “shell”, so you could describe it as a seashell color.

Grammatically, Ardari color terms are adjectives, so they inflect for gender just like any other. They can be used directly as nouns. And you can add the suffix -it to make something like English “-ish”: jorit “reddish”. That’s really all there is to it.

Moving on

Both our conlangs could easily have a hundred more words for various colors, but these are enough for now. You get the idea, after all. So it’s time to head to the next topic. I still haven’t thought of what that will be. At some point (probably by the time I write Part 16), I’ll have to make some tough decisions about the world around Isian and Ardari, because we’re fast approaching the point where that will matter. So the series might go on a hiatus of a few weeks while I brainstorm. We’ll see.