tellingstories
patreon
A Glimpse at the New World Language
🕑 Added 2019-10-08 17:52:16 +0000 UTCSome authors treat the world as nothing more than the ground under the feet of the protagonist, but I don't see it that way. A world is a character all its own, the same for the cultures, the religions. If those are flat, then characters, no matter how bright and rich they may be, are like brightly colored fish flopping around on dry land, they can't really 'swim' they way the could if you give them a sea to swim in.
So to further the worldbuilding, I've crafted a language that the protagonist will have to learn and understand, along with a vocabulary I'm building step by step, it has its own unique grammatical structure and lexicon that reflect the unique culture that birthed it, giving the characters a kind of depth usually lacking in other works.
Language is to some degree a matter of perspective, and any language is going to represent the needs and perspectives of a different way of seeing the world. For example, a small culture in South America, whose name escapes me at the moment, could only speak of the present in terms of experiences. It made their language difficult to translate, because the missionaries who went there were trying to translate without being present for the events that were being described, therefore the language went undeciphered by outsiders for years.
Another used the same word for criminal as they did for 'sin' making it difficult for missionaries to explain that someone was a 'sinner' because the person listening was hearing an accusation that they were a criminal. :D I know, funny. This dependency on language for perspective is often ignored by writers as a matter of convenience, and it just has everybody speaking the same language at the start and that is the end of it.
I want to do things differently. So I'm crafting a language that will also craft the culture that Archos encounters when he first meets the denizens of this unknown land, and learning how to talk to them, will shape how he sees them, and the same will also be true, as they learn about their strange and terrible visitor.
Shown below is a short speech by one new world character: (Kudos for you if you break the code, but if you don't, the translation will be up in the next post)
Tunka'ti, kin'ti, king'ti, beeloni, oos'ma. Ya'sto re a'beeloni mal ibak. A'onija maloa mal, dakos gyon mat, unikos kek. Ya'oos eyapal ibar, am ya ibar eypal oos, a'ya sto re oos te'mat, lak ibil patowa ibto, lak ibil aol ibto. Ya'sto oos et're, oos sto kin'ti et.
