Tag: conlang

Let’s make a language, part 25b: Business (Isian)

Isian, as we have seen before, is spoken by a culture that tends more towards the old-fashioned. It’s not the highly corporate environment of the West, nor the planned, centralized systems common in the East. It’s its own thing, really, a kind of land out of time.

Lucky for us, that makes things easier. We can look at the basic terms below (I’ll assume you can follow along), but I’ll pick out a few that have more nuanced meanings.

First up, masca, “to trade”, is a kind of catch-all. It’s intended more for the economic type of trading, a generic term for buying, selling, bartering, etc. That’s why “business” is translated as the derived noun mascanas. The Isian word might be better considered as “to do business with”.

“Cheap” and “expensive”, dib and gowan respectively, follow the style of other large/small pairs by having distinctive vowels: the high, front vowel i is characteristic of “small” things in many languages. “Poor” and “rich”, on the other hand, might seem backwards, but this could mean that the quality being measured here is poverty rather than wealth. Or it’s just happenstance. That’s a more likely explanation.

Next up, cosen is “money” when used as a mass noun. As a count noun, however, it means something closer to “price” or “amount”. (The difference is that count nouns take articles and quantifiers, while mass nouns don’t.)

And then we come to ama. It’s a bit of an oddity in Isian. It’s strictly translated as “to own”, and it does have an element of possession as its primary connotation. But it’s different from the simpler fana “to have”, because it carries a secondary meaning: the object being owned has monetary value to its owner.

Word list

  • business: mascanas
  • cheap: dib
  • cost: chake
  • expensive: gowan
  • generous: nemis (“generosity”: nemiros)
  • greed: sumat
  • job: bor
  • money: cosen
  • poor: umar
  • rich: irdes
  • to accept: achine
  • to borrow: mante
  • to buy: tochi
  • to gain: elge
  • to get: gana
  • to keep: ifa
  • to lend: hente
  • to lose (possession of): pulo
  • to offer: acate
  • to own: ama
  • to receive: rano
  • to reject: nuyana
  • to sell: dule
  • to steal: toya
  • to store: odaga
  • to trade: masca
  • value: luros

Let’s make a language, part 25a: Business (Intro)

In today’s world, business is big, well, business. Commerce, economy, capitalism rules all. So it’s not surprising that we have a lot of words to describe such a topic. But it wasn’t always that way, and a lot of the terms we use to talk about business are, in fact, derived from strange places.

On the wealth of nations

The idea of value, of course, is about as old as civilization. From the first time one man noticed that his neighbor had something he wanted, we’ve had an economy. When trades became possible, when people became settled enough that they could diversify, business was born. Business then begat money, credit, coin, currency, and all those other nifty things we associate with wealth today.

Word-wise, a lot of basic terms in the business sphere are pretty old. Some English terms (e.g., gold) have come down almost directly from the Indo-European days with little change in meaning. Many others derive from Latin (credit, coin) or Greek (economy). Business itself is an example of an Anglo-Saxon native, dollar is a German loan, and so on.

Tracing the etymology of business and commerce words tells us a lot about the economic history of the English language. A lot of the “technical” terms are classical in origin, stemming from the past few centuries. Words that came about in medieval times represent concepts that existed in those times, and it’s clear that the Romans had an idea of credits and debts. In the oldest days, there might not have been a thriving stock market, but there was indeed a stock market.

“Stock” is meant here as “livestock”, which brings us to the next point: even if there’s no money, that doesn’t mean there’s no wealth. Coin only came about as an easier way to keep track of wealth, but anything can have a price. Land, cattle, grain, slaves, or anything a culture considers valuable will eventually be bought and sold, and the traders will need words to talk about those actions. The earlier they “discover” business, the more likely the base terms will be native, rather than loans from more advanced neighbors.

The day job

It doesn’t take a lot of sophistication to work out the rough outline of an economy. The things people do often will quickly become named, and those things a culture treasures will be among the first in line for native words. An agrarian society built upon a complex system of barter will have a much different set of “core” words than a highly capitalist mercantile empire. An expanding nation full of coinage will spread its money words to its penniless neighbors, as with the Roman denarius, whose descendants can be found throughout the Western world: dinars, deniers, and the “d.” abbreviation for pennies (whether old English coins or American nails).

Work itself can also be the subject of linguistic invention. Today’s English takes a functional approach to that, usually deriving an agent noun out of an action verb (programmer, cameraman). We’ve already seen some of that in earlier parts, but it’s pertinent here, too. And it’s another case where history and etymology mix: although many terms are simple agent derivations, we’ve got a few that aren’t, and those tend to be older.

Tools of the trade

On a more mundane level, the simple acts of trade, being so commonplace, so ancient, will almost certainly be nativized, if not fully native. We buy and sell, we trade and offer. Then again, we also exchange, accept, and reject, and all those are Latin loans. But those aren’t exactly newcomers to the language. They’ve been around. People use them all the time, because they do those things all the time, and the words aren’t considered foreign except by the most extreme purists.

So, once again, we can see the connection between language and culture. Business starts small, with trades, purchases, barter, payment, loans, and the like. Most everybody throughout history has done something of that sort, so there are common words to describe such actions and concepts in most languages. Loanwords will only come about here when an outside force presses them upon the speakers.

As economic science progresses, the terminology grows, but the same golden rule remains. A corporation might seem like a relatively recent invention, but the word is Latin, derived from corpus, the body. Pecuniary is a word that comes from ancient roots related to cattle, a valuable material good in such times. Economy itself? Greek, from an term roughly describing management or administration. The big-business words of today, like quant and blockchain, might not have the same pedigree, but they’re no less a product of their time.

Coming up

The next two weeks will see the usual posts for Isian and Ardari. Next month, however, is another “off” month for the series. Instead, I’ll be making a new translation special, just as soon as I figure out something to translate. Then, we’ll come back in July for Part 26, a study of government. Hopefully, ours won’t be as awful as the real thing.

Meter, language, and culture

In verse, one of the most important parts of the work is its rhythm, the pattern of sounds and syllables and the way they “flow” together. Aesthetically, we perceive a poetic or musical utterance that is out of rhythm as dissonant, like a dancer tripping over his own feet. If you have any ear for music at all, you’ve probably noticed this. Think of when somebody you know tries to fit a bunch of words into the pattern of a familiar song, but he gets them all wrong. The line doesn’t scan, and it sounds awful.

This is one expression of the idea of meter. Now, if you remember English classes in high school, you probably recall those endless lessons about classical meter. You know, iambic pentameter, and…nobody older than sixteen can ever name any of the others. I know I can’t without looking them up.

But meter isn’t just important for reading Shakespeare and pleasing English teachers. (Personally, I didn’t care for either of those activities.) It’s actually an integral part of language as a whole, and verse in particular.

Unit of measurement

Now, I’m not going into a long digression about the kinds of meter and all that. I just don’t want to, and it doesn’t really help the discussion. Instead, this post will focus on the generalities of meter and how they relate to a language and a culture. That, I believe, is more enlightening than trying to memorize the difference between an iamb and a trochee or whatever.

Meter is the rhythm of language, as I said, and each language has its own, even before you start talking about poetry. Some languages, for instance, have a fixed stress position; according to WALS Chapter 14, about 56% are like this. Of these, most have a fixed stress on the penultimate (second to last) or initial syllable of a word, while the final syllable is a fairly distant 3rd place.

Now, if a language requires stress to be in a certain place, then that’s something verse has to work around. It forces a kind of “template” on meter. Initial and penultimate stress, for instance, both imply a stressed-unstressed (trochaic) pattern, while final stress gives the opposite (iambic) pattern. That doesn’t always have to be true, of course, but there’s an obvious pressure to do things that way.

A lot of other languages, however, are like English. Their stress can move around. In English, for example, affixes can and do affect stress: compare nation (stress on first syllable) to nationality (stress on the third from the last).

In such languages, there’s no obvious “default” meter. Now, there can be other factors determining which rhythms are acceptable, but any rules are more along the lines of convention than law. Thus, English has a rich history of different meter types, and these have come to be associated with different authors, styles, and even moods.

If you’re making your own language (and culture), then this knowledge gives you an edge on pursuing more creative aspects of your work. Say you’ve already decided that your conlang has a fixed penultimate stress. Well, the speakers will naturally gravitate towards poetic meters which go well with that.

Length of a meter

Now, that’s only half the problem. For a lot of verse, not only are you worrying about the rhythmic pattern of “heavy” and “light” syllables, but also how many there are. That’s where the “pentameter” part of “iambic pentameter” comes in: one line of that meter is five feet long, each of which is an iamb. (One meter, of course, is about 3.28 feet, but that’s neither here nor there. And so ends your daily dose of puns.)

English, thanks to its startling propensity for muttering, shortening, and just plain ignoring unstressed syllables, gets a lot of leeway in this department, but there’s only so far you can really go. Really, the length of a line is going to be measured in stresses, however a language counts them, and a verse in a consistent meter will have lines containing generally the same number of those stresses. (That’s where the “poor scanning” thing comes in: the words you’re trying to fit into the rhythm don’t line up with the expected stress pattern, so it sounds forced and unnatural.)

In languages without overt stress, the principle is roughly the same. Pitch-accent languages may be able to substitute high pitch or pitch drops for stress. Tonal languages are a bit harder, but there will be patterns there, too. And we can even talk about line length separate from meter, as in Japanese haiku, with their fixed structure of three lines, containing, in order, five, seven, and five morae. (A mora is like a syllable, except that, e.g., long vowels count as two morae instead of one. Some languages use these as the basic constituent of meter, rather than syllables.)

A musical note

Meter carries over from poetry into song, too. After all, they both come from the same foundations. In Western music, for example, 4/4 time is common, and the usual pattern is a heavier “stress” on the first and third beats of a measure. If you consider each beat to be a syllable (or mora, if your language is doing that), then that maps quite naturally onto a trochaic rhythm. Put the emphasis on beats two and four instead, and you’ve got something iambic.

There are a few easy ways you can use that to your advantage. One, you can assume that the off beats are unstressed syllables, making each measure two metrical feet, if we’re using 4/4 time. (Something like, say, 6/4 would be different, but the math should be easy.) Another option is to take one beat as the primary stress, turning each measure into a single foot.

Once you get outside the Western musical tradition, this pattern tends to break down, but not the basic idea of it. Beats match up with stresses, pitch changes, or whatever a language uses. That’s not even a cultural thing, really. It’s pretty much hardwired into our brains. The cultural aspect is all in deciding what patterns we want to hear.

Crescendo

Writing verse is hard. I can’t do it—that’s why I’m writing about it instead. Setting it to music is even more difficult. But the basics aren’t impossible to understand. Verse, whether in poetry or song, comes down to following (and knowing when not to follow) simple patterns in language. Meter is one of those patterns, an imprint upon our poetry, a kind of paint-by-numbers outline. If you’ve ever tapped your foot to a song or been entranced by a chant or speech, you know how powerful those patterns can be.

On idioms

One of the hardest things about creating a realistic, naturalistic language of your own is capturing some of the ways real-world languages create meaning. Some of those ways are less than obvious, as anyone who’s tried to translate metaphors well knows. And idioms might be the worst of all.

Definitions

Idioms, in essence, are phrases with meanings that are not obvious, that can’t be determined by looking at their constituent parts. They’re figures of speech. They often grow out of slang or colloquialisms, they may be highly dialectal, and many are simply untranslatable. An idiom’s meaning will often be figurative, not literal (though this isn’t always the case), and there can often be significant cultural associations involved.

Now, idioms aren’t the same thing as metaphors and similes. Those are comparisons. Equations, if you will. An idiom, on the other hand, is simply a fixed phrase with a specific meaning, one that substitutes for the “real thing”. And they’re also not necessarily euphemisms, because there doesn’t have to be any hiding involved. Everything can be out in the open, but it may be harder to put together, especially if you’re not a native speaker.

English, of course, is full of idioms. We talk about jokes or lies as “pulling one’s leg”, for instance, and a sad person might be described as “feeling blue”, a familiar one as “ringing a bell”. Neither of these phrases makes any literal sense, as (unless you have synaesthesia) you can’t really “feel” blue. Some others, like “knock on wood” and “cross my heart” may have grown out of actual practices, but they’ve since become idiomatic.

Translations

The problem with idioms is that, because they’re so very culture-specific, they’re exceedingly difficult to translate. In some cases, they may even be impossible to render into another language while still preserving some semblance of meaning. Literal, word-by-word translation fails utterly, because of the figurative nature of the idiom; it may be a phrase made up of words, but it’s an indivisible unit.

Many languages, especially those closely related, may have idioms with similar meanings, which helps. But a conlang, by definition, doesn’t have that luxury. Again, literal translations won’t work, so what do we do?

For auxiliary languages, the best option might be to ignore idioms altogether. The whole point of an auxlang is to foster communication, and figures of speech actively work against clarity. So, we can just distill English (or whatever) idioms to their core meaning, and translate that instead. Simple, right? (Well, wrong, but it’s close enough for now.)

More artistic conlangs are worse off when they need to translate idioms. When you’re first starting with a new language, the “distill” approach might be your best bet, but as your creation gets more involved, more complex, you’re going to have to come up with something better.

Creation

Eventually, you may need to start creating your own idioms. Either you want to use them in your conlang, or you’ve come to the conclusion that the best method of translating out of English (or your native tongue) is to swap like for like. Here’s one of the more creative areas of language construction, which naturally means that it’s one of the hardest to generalize.

Idioms are figures of speech. If you’re making a conlang that has any sort of culture behind it, then you’ll need to think about what figures into that culture. History, art, religion, science, politics, mythology, and almost anything else can come into play here. For example, a lot of our English idioms derive from medieval or early modern Christian beliefs (“the devil’s in the details”) or culture (“the proof is in the pudding”), but the past few decades have brought an increasing number of modern creations referring to technology (“information superhighway”; fortunately, that one finally died out) or media (“Netflix and chill”).

For a conlang, then, idioms require a cultural backdrop. It doesn’t have to be perfect, and you only have to go into as much detail as the work requires, but if you want to make something natural-looking, you might need to do a lot more thinking than you originally anticipated. Borrowing (which you might think is the easiest way to go) doesn’t really work, though you might be able to get away with importing a few English modernisms into a near-future conlang—you could always blame the Internet. Everybody else does.

Finally, if you want to make idioms for aliens, well, have fun with that. Seriously, those will require even more careful thought, and you’ll likely end up with a lot of phrases that simply do not translate at all. Come to think of it, that may be a good thing…

Conclusion

I know there’s not a lot here. As I said before, idioms, being figurative and not easily “buildable” in the same sense as the rest of a language, don’t lend themselves well to generalizations. We use them all the time, but it turns out to be really hard to define them precisely enough for cross-language purposes. They’re one of the hardest parts of a language to learn, because they don’t fit in, and that also makes them nearly (if not entirely) impossible to translate. Not really a winning combination for artificial languages. Hence, idiom creation is an art, not a science. The best advice I can think of? Follow your heart. (Oh, and there’s an idiom for you. What a way to end a post, right?)

Let’s make a language, part 24c: The mind (Ardari)

As with Isian last week, I’m not going to bother with the rundown of Ardari vocabulary. Let’s focus on the cases where it doesn’t match up with the glosses in the list instead.

First up is tor- “to agree with”. You’ll notice the parenthetical down there; “to agree” is tory-, a derived intransitive. Thus “I agree with you” is torotya, while simple “I agree” is toryma, with the usual split-S concord trickery.

The Ardari word for “sad”, jysall, is a bit harsher than its English counterpart. To be jysall, you have to be really sad, like “in tears” level! Anything else is merely umil “unhappy”.

With tèch “nice”, it’s something of the opposite. “Nice”, for a speaker of Ardari, is good, wholesome, kind, thoughtful, and even pretty. It’s possibly more general than the English word is in formal contexts, but about the same as in colloquial speech. The man who picks up that bag you dropped is tèch, but so is the bag itself, if it was, say, a Christmas present.

In much the same vein, trodyn “wise” has a bit of an expanded meaning in Ardari. A good idea is trodyn, as are your elders. Anything that makes you laugh can be considered säv “funny”, but you have to be beyond hopping mad before you’re considered nyol “angry” instead of merely urkwis “un-calm”.

Regular derivations exist for pretty much all the words below. Adjectives can easily be turned into nouns: nyolymat “anger”, trodynymat “wisdom”, milyëmat “happiness”. (Note the slight change in that last one to prevent the awkward letter sequence -yy-.) Verbs work, too: salmönda “love”, bejëkön “thinker”, toròs “agreeable”, chòmnyn “action” (an irregular example).

Word list

  • angry: nyol
  • brave: noll
  • calm: kwis
  • funny: säv
  • happy: mil(y)
  • intelligent: sund
  • mind: broma
  • nice: tèch
  • sad: jysall
  • thankful: därynt
  • to act: chòma-
  • to agree: tory- (trans. “to agree with”: tor-)
  • to decide: bèlse-
  • to fear: nurh-
  • to feel: luch-
  • to hate: jad-
  • to know: trod-
  • to learn: prèll-
  • to love: salm-
  • to remember: ingri-
  • to teach: sydon-
  • to thank: där-
  • to think: bejë-
  • to want: majtas-
  • wise: trodyn

Next time

Remember, no posts for this series next month. We’ll be back in May to look at how Isian and Ardari talk business. Until then, have fun exploring the minds of your own conlangs.

Let’s make a language, part 24b: The mind (Isian)

There’s not too much to say about the collection of words this time around, and I’m not going to bother with the whole “here’s what they can do” deal again. You should have a pretty good idea of that by now. Instead, we’ll look at some of the connotations that are different in Isian.

First off, mac “mind” refers more to the abstract notion of a thinking organ, as opposed to sayban “brain”. The latter only talks about that physical bit inside your skull, while the former can’t refer to it at all. It’s a more defined distinction than in English, where the two terms can be almost interchangeable.

Second, itey “funny” indicates humor, but not most of the other senses of its English counterpart. An Isian joke would be itey, but not something oddly shaped. (That’s not to say you can’t use it in a metaphorical sense, but it’s not the dictionary definition.)

Similarly, erda “act” isn’t used for a movie star. It’s more of a general term, probably better translated as “to take action”. It can also function in the sense of “to make oneself become”, as in erda yali “cheer up” or erdacan halu “I’ve calmed down”.

The word cobet, translated below as “intelligent”, also means “sentient” or “sapient”, in a technical context. But almerat “wise” can mean both of those, too. In this sense, almerat is more “philosophical”, while cobet is more “scientific”.

Finally, essentially all of the terms in the list below have regular derivations. Isian speakers can talk about happiness by saying yaliros, and they can be unhappy (but not necessarily sad) with ayalin. Agreement is awconas, hatred uldinas, and so on. True wisdom, or almeratos, is something few speakers believe exists, but that doesn’t mean they don’t strive for it.

Word list

  • angry: hayka
  • brave: abor
  • calm: halu
  • funny: itey
  • happy: yali
  • intelligent: cobet
  • mind: mac
  • nice: nim
  • sad: nulsa
  • thankful: nichodo
  • to act: erda
  • to agree: awco
  • to decide: sade
  • to fear: poyo
  • to feel: ilsi
  • to hate: uldi
  • to know: altema
  • to learn: nate
  • to love: hame
  • to remember: noga
  • to teach: reshone
  • to thank: nicho
  • to think: tico
  • to want: doche
  • wise: almerat

Let’s make a language, part 24a: The mind (Intro)

Humans are not alone in having emotions, desires, and mental capacities. We are, however, alone on this planet in having the higher cognition functions commonly described as sapience. (Now, there’s nothing saying alien species can’t have the same, but that’s a different post.) And we’re also alone in possessing the full capabilities of language. In this part of the series, we’ll look at how those two uniquely human attributes combine to produce the linguistic expression of our minds, and how a language can encode those attributes.

The center of thought

Cogito ergo sum, goes the saying, and it may be one of the most profound in existence. I think, therefore I am. It’s pure humanity distilled into three words of Latin, five of English. We are thinking beings. We can think about thinking. And we can speak about thinking.

Thought, then, is going to play a part in any language’s vocabulary. We have the English verb think to start, obviously, but that’s far from the end of the story. Not only can we think, but we can know. We can understand or comprehend. We can deduce, perceive, and reason. All these are related to thought and cognition, but in different ways. Knowing something is true, for example, is different from knowing (i.e., recognizing) a person’s face; some languages split this distinction into two verbs. Understanding and comprehending are likewise slightly different, but then there are languages out there that combine the two into a single term.

Without veering too far into philosophy, it’s still easy to see the potential for a lot of vocabulary variation. How a culture’s speech divides the linguistic space of thought tells a lot about how they think. It’s not quite the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (language determines thought patterns), but you might think of it as a weaker form.

Of course, talking about the mind’s function is a lot easier for us than for, say, the ancient Greeks. But most of our technical terminology comes from classical sources, formed following the usual agglutinative patterns of English scientific vocabulary. A conlang might look to its own “classical” cousin for inspiration, or it might borrow from a more advanced neighbor, or its speakers could instead choose to coin their own terms. That’s up to you.

The seat of emotion

Although the ancients may have considered the heart the source of human emotion, we now know it comes from the brain. So emotions therefore fall under the category of mental terms, too.

Emotion is easy for us to recognize, for reasons that should be fairly obvious—society probably couldn’t function if we didn’t know how to read the unspoken signals of our fellow man. So it’s not surprising that many languages have a native stock of emotion words. We can say we’re happy or sad, for instance. We can talk about feeling love or envy towards another. But every language runs out eventually; there aren’t any native English words for ennui, acedia, or Schadenfreude, among many others.

Humans all feel roughly the same variety of emotions, too (ignoring psychopaths and the like), so there’s going to be a good cross-linguistic alignment of emotion terms. One language may have three different kinds of “happy”, but you can bet none of them are going to indicate anger. (For non-human conlangs, this is another chance to get creative. Short-circuiting basic assumptions regarding emotion will very easily give a culture an alien feel.)

Conclusion

There’s a lot to the mind. Philosophers wouldn’t have spent the last few thousand years talking about it otherwise. It’s the center of our humanity, the source of thought, reason, logic, and emotion. What we do with it is up to us, but how we talk about it is a matter of language. There’s not too much room for variation here, except in the margins. As long as we’re thinking, we’ll have a verb to say that’s what we’re doing. As long as we can feel happiness, there will be a word for it.

Strictly speaking, the next part of this series, Part 25, is supposed to be about business. However, I’ve got other plans for the month of April, including some Patreon and Amazon releases, so I’m putting off the next installment of “Let’s Make a Language” until May. I’ve been going at it for about two years now, and I think I deserve a break.

Virisai pronunciation guide

On my Patreon page, I’ve been posting drafts of a series of long novellas (or short novels, whichever you prefer) called Chronicles of the Otherworld. I won’t reiterate the entire plot of the story here, as that’s what the Patreon is for. Suffice to say, it’s a kind of alternate-universe thing, except without the alternate universes.

On the “otherworld” are a number of invented cultures loosely based on the indigenous peoples of the Americas, but with about 10,000 years of parallel development—including 500 years free from European colonization—and some genetic engineering by a mysterious precursor race. All this has caused their languages to be different from any on Earth. In other words, I built a story around a conlang. It’s okay; Tolkien did pretty much the same thing.

This post describes the pronunciation and orthography of the main conlang of the Chronicles of the Otherworld series, called Virisai. Story-internally, it is spoken by approximately one million people in and around the pre-industrial nation of Vistaan, where most of the Otherworld series takes place. Externally, I started making it in 2013, which doesn’t really feel like four years ago. My goal with Virisai was to make a natural-looking language that wasn’t too hard to grasp (the protagonists only have about two and a half months) while having no real connection to Earthly tongues. Ten thousand years, after all, is enough to give us the linguistic variety of Europe, the Middle East, and most of India…or of the indigenous languages of the Americas. In future posts, if there is interest, I’ll delve more deeply into the language. It’s one of my most developed conlangs, second only to Suvile, which I worked on from 2003–2010, and it remains in development, as I’m currently working on future entries in the series.

Finally, a word before we begin: the meat of this post is written from the point of view of someone treating Virisai as an actual language. If you prefer to think of it as the writing of a character in the story, that’s fine. From this point forward, though, I won’t be referring to any “external” qualities of the language, only what a speaker would understand.

The sounds of the language

Virisai has a fairly simple phonology. In total, there are 31 sounds: 21 distinct consonants, 5 vowels that show distinction between short and long. All of these sounds are simple, in that there are no phonemic distinctions of consonant length, palatalization, tone, or other complex phonetic properties. Speaking Virisai is not difficult for most people, unlike some of its neighboring tongues. The orthography, however, can be a bit difficult to understand.

While there are some dialectal differences, mostly between east and west, these do not rise to the level of unintelligibility. For the most part, this guide will describe the “standard” dialect of the east, with western differences noted as they arise.

Vowels

As there are fewer vowels, it seems prudent to begin with them. As stated above, Virisai has five main vowels, with each coming in a short and long variety. Long vowels sound approximately like double-length versions of their short counterparts, but many also give the short vowels a more lax pronunciation.

  • A: The vowel a (as in aloc “mill”) is most often pronounced like the Spanish or Italian a. At the end of a word, it may instead sound like German er as in oder. Western dialects use a pronunciation like a in English cat at the beginning of a word.

  • E: The vowel e (as in esau “lake”) is commonly pronounced like the e in English bet. In stressed positions, it can also sound like the more tense French é of été. Colloquially, an unstressed e can also be pronounced as a schwa, as in English taken.

  • I: The short vowel i (as in imec “gift”) should be pronounced as in Spanish, but it very often becomes lax, as in English bit. This relaxation is common among lower-class Virisai speakers in the west.

  • O: Short o (as in oca “but”) usually sounds like the o in French sot, but that of English not is sometimes heard instead, especially in unstressed syllables.

  • U: The short u (as in uro “round”) is pronounced as in Spanish, but the oo sound of English foot is also acceptable.

  • AA: The long vowel aa (as in baad “dog”) is a longer version of a. It can be approximated by the British English pronunciation of bath, or simply by stretching out the pronunciation of a.

  • EI: The vowel ei (as in eib “fish”) sounds like a longer variant of stressed e. The English diphthong ay of say is a close, if strictly incorrect, approximation.

  • IE: Long ie (as in mies “top”) sounds like English ee as in feet.

  • OO: Long oo (as in sool “glass”) is pronounced like a longer o. As with ei above, the English diphthong ow of glow is close, although not exactly the same.

  • OU: The vowel ou (as in crous “to write”) sounds like English oo in boot.

  • AI or AY: Both of these two spellings (ai as in ain “corn”; ay as in ayc “duck”) represent the sound of i in English like.

  • OI or OY: These two spellings (oi as in boi “nut”; oy as in proy “mad”) are pronounced as in English boy.

  • AU: The diphthong au (as in aus “cat”) sounds like ou in English out or au in English caught. The two sounds are in free variation; the preference is largely personal. The sound can also be spelled aw, if needed to prevent ambiguity.

  • EU: The diphthong eu (as in keud “deer”) has no exact English equivalent, but it can be approximated by the sound of you. When detailing western Virisai, this sound is often spelled ew.

In addition, some western dialects have a set of four front rounded vowels, two long and two short. These arise regularly from combinations of the consonant y (see below) and the vowels u, ou, o, and oo. They are presented here for completeness.

  • Y: This sound (as in lys “flower”) is a short vowel pronounced like French u or German ü.

  • UE: The vowel ue (as in bueder, a type of grain) is the long form of y, pronounced like German ü.

  • OE: The short vowel oe (as in goer “now”) is pronounced like French eu in peu.

  • EU: The long vowel eu (as in Beus, a month name) is pronounced like German ö, a longer form of oe above.

Consonants

Despite there being more of them, the consonants are much more regular in the correspondence between their written and spoken forms. Only in a few instances are there great differences. Here, we will leave those for last.

First, these are the Virisai consonants most similar to their English equivalents:

  • B: The sound b (as in boun “big”) is pronounced as in English bee.

  • D: The consonant d (as in den “from”) is pronounced the same as in English dog.

  • G: The consonant g (as in gos “cold”) has the same pronunciation as in English good.

  • H: The letter h (as in heid “this”) has the same pronunciation as in English hat under most circumstances. When followed by b, d, or g, however, it instead has no sound, and causes the following consonant to be pronounced as p, t, or k, respectively.

  • J: The letter j (as in jon “give”) sounds like that of English jest.

  • K: The letter k (as in kit “dice”) has the same sound as in English sky. There should be no puff of air following it, unlike in English key. This letter is only used before e, i, ei, and ie.

  • L: The consonant l (as in los “last”) sounds like the “clear” l of English let. It doesn’t normally have the “dark” sound of American English feel, though few native speakers can tell the difference.

  • M: The sound m (as in maame “mother”) sounds the same as in English mom.

  • N: The sound n (as in nin “sky”) has the same sound as English night.

  • NY: The sound written ny (as in nyaal “south”) is pronounced as the ni in English onion, or like the Spanish ñ.

  • P: The consonant p (as in pic “horn”) has the same pronunciation as in English spit. Unlike in English, there should be no audible “puff” after the sound. (In technical terms, it is unaspirated.)

  • R: The letter written r (as in rad “say”) has a pronunciation similar to English r in red, not that of the Spanish, French, or German r.

  • T: The consonant t (as in tec “temple”) sounds like that of English stay. Like Virisai p, it is also unaspirated.

  • V: The letter v (as in veis “go”) has a sound like that of Spanish b or v, not the English v. It can be approximated by pronouncing English v without the teeth.

  • W: The letter w (as in wan “river”) sounds like English w. It is distinct from v, but the difference can be hard for some to hear. V, however, is more forceful.

  • Y: The consonant y (as in yet “do”; not the same as the dialectal vowel sound y above) sounds exactly like English y in yet.

The rest of the consonant sounds are written in ways that may change depending on the position of the word, the following sounds, or other factors.

  • C: The letter c can represent a hard k (as in caar “name”) when written before anything other than e, i, ie, or ei. Before those letters (as in cil “small”), it is instead pronounced like the ch in English chat.

  • CI: The digraph ci (as in ciar “bottom”) is the standard writing for the ch sound of English char, used whenever a plain c would be pronounced as k.

  • F: The letter f (as in faus “rain”) has the same pronunciation as v above. It is written with a different letter in Virisai, reflecting a distinction of sound that is now lost.

  • NN: A doubled nn is not actually used in Virisai, but the author has used it to transcribe the word Ninne (feminine form of Nina, a racial term) so as to avoid confusion with the English word nine.

  • S: The letter s changes its pronunciation depending on its environment. At the start of a word (as in si “day”), it is pronounced like the s in English see. The same is true at the end of a word (as in pries “only”), when followed by a vowel other than i, e, ie, or ei (as in masa “yes”), or followed by a consonant (as in ostir “shoulder”). When preceding one of the four vowels mentioned (as in tiesie “short”), it is instead pronounced like the sh in English show.

  • SH: At the beginning of a word, or when preceding a consonant, the digraph sh (as in shei “daytime”) is pronounced as in English show.

  • SI: The digraph si (as in sias “blue”) is an alternate spelling of sh, used much more commonly when ambiguity would not arise.

  • SS: The doubled ss (as in susse “smooth”) is pronounced like the s in English set. It is used before e, i, ie, and ei, except at the beginning of a word.

  • Z: Like s above, the letter z changes pronunciation depending on where it occurs. Except directly before one of the four front vowels above (as in zaad “west”), it is pronounced like English z in zoo. Before front vowels (as in feizen “trade”), it sounds like the z in English azure.

  • ZH: As with sh, the digraph zh (as in zhaan “safe”) is written at the beginning of a word to indicate the z sound of English azure.

  • ZI: As with si, the digraph zi (as in ziule “fort”) is an alternate spelling of zh.

  • ZZ: Like ss, the doubled zz (as in dezzic “late”) is only used before front vowels. It is pronounced like the z in English zoo.

Consonant sequences

The grammar of Virisai causes a few cases where consonants can form sequences that look like clusters, but are pronounced as if single consonants. In each of the following, the first member of the sequence is actually silent: dt, bp, gc, zs, td, pb, cg, sz, szi, zsi, dci, tj.

Stress

Under normal circumstances, Virisai stresses the syllable before the last—the penultimate. However, a long vowel or a diphthong in the final syllable will receive stress instead. Inflection affixes are almost never stressed, but they can cause a stress shift in a word’s stem: singular soulos (stress on the first syllable), plural soulossin (stress on the second).

Closing words

The preceding should be enough to pronounce any of the utterances encountered in Chronicles of the Otherworld. Understanding them, of course, is a matter for future posts. As the series progresses, I’ll write further entries describing the Virisai language, so those willing to learn can follow the story at a deeper level.

Let’s make a language, part 23c: Food and drink (Ardari)

As with Isian, for the Ardari post I won’t be adding too many culture-specific words. Remember that these two conlangs are supposed to be a base on which to build. We’ll stick to generalities here.

For Ardari fès and fan (food and drink, respectively), the situation is largely the same. The three-meal structure is a little older, however, with indrajat “breakfast” and vòllrajat “lunch” being a bit fluid in their timing, but dèllar “dinner” always coming last.

Women aren’t the only ones to cook (lòsty-) in Ardari society. Men do, too, but only in certain ways. It’s the man’s job, for instance, to cook certain kinds of meat (arba). And either sex can bake (päk-), especially if they’re baking bread (namis päk ky). Frying (taynönda) is usually a woman’s job, though.

Ardari speakers eat more meat than their Isian neighbors, and they like their beverages. In addition to vingo (“wine”, usually imported), they have a drink made from a kind of milk (mechi) that is at least as alcoholic. If you don’t like that, though, you can always opt for simple obla “water”.

Soups and stews (both senses are covered by the general term zow) are common, usually laden with different kinds of èlyat “spice”; the historically recent introduction of New World crops expanded this part of the Ardari chef’s repertoire considerably. Salt (akor) used to be just as important, but modern advances have demoted it to just another type of seasoning.

Word List

General terms
  • beverage/drink: fan
  • dinner: dèllar
  • food: fès
  • meal: rajat
  • oven: gralla
  • to bake: päk-
  • to cook: lòsty-
  • to drink: kabus-
  • to eat: tum-
  • to fry: tayn-
Specific foodstuffs
  • bread: nami
  • cheese: kyèsi
  • flour: plari
  • honey: wychi
  • meat: arba
  • milk: mechi
  • oil: dub
  • salt: akor
  • soup: zow
  • spice: èlyat
  • sugar: susi
  • water: obla
  • wine: vingo

Let’s make a language, part 23b: Food and drink (Isian)

There aren’t too many new words this time around, but that’s because (as I said in the intro post for this part) many “meal” terms are largely untranslatable. In addition, a lot of foods simply use the terms for the plant or animal they are derived from, so choch “chicken” can refer to both the bird and its meat, and an Isian speaker can eat puri “apples” just as easily (grammatically speaking) as he can grow them.

So let’s take a look at a few words that are specific to the preparation and consumption of food and drink. First, we’ll start with the basic terms for those two concepts: tema and jasan. Isian speakers used to only have two basic meals (aydis) during a day, but modern times have imported the three-meals-a-day standard. Two or three, the most important is dele, “dinner”, meant to be eaten with one’s family after a long day.

It’s usually the Isian woman who cooks (piri). Some men do, but this is the exception rather than the rule. One popular type of cooking is baking (atri, “to bake”), in which food is placed into an oven (otal). There are, of course, other methods, however.

As with many societies, the most important ingredient for most foods is flour, or cha, which is most often used to make pinda, a kind of bread. Dinner usually includes a kind of meat (shek) somewhere, sometimes in a dab “soup”, and often prepared with hac “salt” and various jagir “spices”; the old days, when seasonings were restricted to the wealthy, are long gone.

Dairy products are common, with mel “milk” often being turned into such products as kem “cheese”. For sweetening, Isian speakers have sugar (sije), but some recipes instead call for simya “honey”. As for drinks, water (shos) is the simplest, but many adults are not opposed to a glass of uni “wine”.

Word list

General terms
  • beverage/drink: jasan
  • dinner: dele
  • food: tema
  • meal: aydi(s)
  • oven: otal
  • to bake: atri
  • to cook: piri
  • to drink: jesa
  • to eat: hama
Generic foodstuffs
  • bread: pinda(r)
  • cheese: kem
  • flour: cha
  • honey: simya
  • meat: shek
  • milk: mel
  • oil: gul
  • salt: hac
  • soup: dab
  • spice: jagi(r)
  • sugar: sije
  • water: shos
  • wine: uni