Language Trees and Creoles: inspiration & spark

This post is Part 6 of a series to augment the Author's Manifesto available for free download. Start with Part 1 here.

This and other inspirations of mine are gathered in the Spark Directory for you to explore.

Find more linguistic content in my Language Directory.

In Part 1 of this series, I began my love affair with languages. At some point, I made a language map to show how all my fantasy dialects evolved from the original five tongues I constructed. I chose a heartland for each of the languages, and I showed how the neighboring regions were influenced by the nearby language.

As the merfolk spread from the sea, coastal areas began to feel the influence of Meri. As the nymphs traded with the forest outside their glade, A'lari traveled northward. As the humans sailed beyond their initial islands, Thone infiltrated the whole archipelago. As the faeries spread from their western forests, Kalrei traveled outward too. And as the elves descended their mountains to colonize the plains, Ka'e influenced the languages already spoken in the area.

Check out this Author's Manifesto for more of my inspirations!

The map was awesome but dizzying, so I also made a language tree to show how each dialect is related. I didn't intend to create every dialect, but it was important for me to see how the unifying language in the Known World, Allanic, evolved from different creoles of the original five languages. And rather than invent Allanic itself, I decided to create words as I needed them, picking and choosing cool features from the five ancestral languages to give it a truly hodgepodge feel.

Unable to go much further, I turned to lands outside the current scope of my Tales of the Known World saga to find new language opportunities. For the distant southern continent, I began work on Abidyajan, the fluid language of a great desert civilization. I doodled some potential alphabets into a notebook and worked out their creation myth, but I shelved the project until my first six books are complete. I'm not even sure where the notes are at this point. I earned my Bachelor of Arts in Linguistics and shuttled off to post-college life, eager to use my skills to become a published author.


That's it for this post! Up Next: Fixing up some defiant pronunciations...

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The Five Related Tongues: inspiration & spark

This post is Part 5 of a series to augment the Author's Manifesto available for free download. Start with Part 1 here.

This and other inspirations of mine are gathered in the Spark Directory for you to explore.

Find more linguistic content in my Language Directory.

In Part 1 of this series, I fell in love with linguistics. After constructing my Meri language, I had a template to invent the other four languages related to the ancestral tongue Ryunic. I tackled Thone, the language of the humans, next. To account for the different names of my human characters and their native regions, I compiled a list of sounds and started making language rules that would result in the correct pronunciation of those names.

Like with Meri, I embraced these inconsistencies and complexities as cool nuance that added realism to the language. With so much going on with the sounds of Thone, I had no room to impose a fatal flaw as I had with my previous languages. Instead, I embraced the link between humans and dark magic, evoking a writing system akin to the daemon language rather than the alphabet of Meri. In Thone, each syllable gets its own symbol, and the writing system doesn't differentiate between certain consonant pairs, such as /t/ and /d/, or /k/ and /g/.

Check out this Author's Manifesto for more of my inspirations!

After the Thone debacle, I chose to be more careful in how I invented the last three languages. For Ka'e, the tongue of the elves, I decided to use only lax vowels, despite the linguistic principle that any spoken language will try to help differentiate vowels by making some tense and some lax.

For the faerie language Kalrei, I decided to use only front vowels, though the same linguistic principle would drive a spoken language to mix some back vowels in with the front ones. To stave off the effects of this principle, I assigned tones to each of the faerie vowels to aid in differentiation. And though I had writing systems for Thone, Ka'e, and Kalrei, I opted to skip the creation myth translation entirely. Even now, I have no writing samples, just examples of single words written in each of the languages.

With four languages down, it was time to tackle A'lari, the tongue of the nymphs. At the time, the nymphs in my Tales of the Known World saga was completely illiterate, so I had no writing system to develop for A'lari. In many ways, this made the nymph tongue rather boring to me, and I spent very little time on it at first. For its fatal flaw, I opted to use only sonorants, a type of consonant including the liquids /r/ and /l/, the glides /w/ and /y/, and the nasal /n/.

Five consonants does not yield much variety for a language, so to boost the number of possible syllables in A'lari, I added three long consonants and provided for a multitude of vowels. There are nine short vowels and nine long vowels, and eighteen nasalized counterparts. There are two syllabic consonants, and a number of the vowels can take final consonants as well. In total, there are a staggering 967 possible syllables in A'lari, and they can be combined in a practically infinite number of ways.


That's it for this post! Up Next: Blending my languages into new dialects...

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Constructing the Merfolk Language: inspiration & spark

This post is Part 4 of a series to augment the Author's Manifesto available for free download. Start with Part 1 here.

This and other inspirations of mine are gathered in the Spark Directory for you to explore.

Find more linguistic content in my Language Directory.

In Part 1 of this series, my passion for linguistics ignited, and I drove myself to invent a language for each of the five races in my fantasy novels. The merfolk are the oldest race, so it made sense to start my five related languages with Meri.

For each of my languages, I envisioned a fatal flaw, something that defied linguistic principles in a subtle yet pervasive way. I wanted the languages to feel realistic while still harboring a clandestine weirdness that only my fellow linguists would discern. For Dyau, I omitted all nasal sounds, though there is an /m/ or /n/ sound in every single human language. For the daemon language, I omitted all vowels and voiced consonants.

Check out this Author's Manifesto for more of my inspirations!

For Meri, I did the exact opposite and omitted all voiceless consonants. It occurred to me that a language spoken underwater would need to be completely voiced. Try to hum underwater, and you'll find that others can hear the voiced sound. But if you whisper, there are only voiceless bubbles that no one can distinguish. Of course, the merfolk wouldn't be using air to transmit their speech, but I still decided that voiceless sounds like /t/ and /sh/ wouldn't be included in Meri.

That's when some trouble started. Going through my characters and place-names, I realized that the Meri language already included three voiceless letters. Names like Dynde worked fine, but names like Rovikya, Sonne, and Dohar defied my new rule against voiceless sounds. But instead of renaming everything, I recalled how Star Trek's linguist Marc Okrand developed Klingon and Vulcan out of nonsense gibberish.

Inspired to salvage my Tales of the Known World saga, I decided that Meri's /h/ wasn't a consonant at all. Much like the silent /e/ at the end of many English words, I used the /h/ in Meri to change the way a syllable's vowel was pronounced. That left /k/ and /s/ for me to iron out, and I decided to employ them as special sonar clicks rather than traditional consonants. Dolphins use sonar clicks to communicate underwater, so why wouldn't a sentient underwater race have a few sonar clicks as consonants?

With the rules of Meri outlined, I wrote a long creation myth for the merfolk and set about translating it into the language. Though I didn't finish my translation, I did develop the first page or two into a sample of the Meri script. I didn't have Photoshop then, so I spent arduous hours in MS Paint, carefully lining up letters to create my script samples. With so much work in front of me, I decided that what I had of the merfolk myth was sufficient as a sample, and I moved on to the other languages that needed fleshing out.


That's it for this post! Up Next: Inventing a family of fantasy languages...

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The Five Prophetic Ages: inspiration & spark

This post is Part 6 of a series to augment the Author's Manifesto available for free download. Start with Part 1 here.

This and other inspirations of mine are gathered in the Spark Directory for you to explore.

Find more prophetic poetry in my Portents Directory.

In Part 1 of this series, I started on a spiritual path that led me to some deep insights, which I seek to explore throughout my fantasy novels. Inspired by my understanding of self-fulfilling destiny, I created the five prophetic ages of the Known World.

I. The Dawn Age began the world, and every person could prophesy at will. Such ready access to the future eroded their need to predict everything in advance. They discovered that life was more enjoyable when it wasn't planned from start to finish. But some sought to gain control of the amassed knowledge of the future, and the Dawn Age ended in war. The prophetic merfolk concluded that knowledge should always be shared, even with the ungifted landfolk.

II. Next came the Open Age, when prophesy texts were shared before interpretation, and meanings were deduced collaboratively. In many ways, this mirrors how humans discuss facts and gather evidence before drawing meaningful conclusions. Whether we like it or not, these conclusions influence the unfolding of our lives, and they force us into conflicts with those of differing conclusions. When some unsettling tidings of war and suffering induced panic amongst the landfolk, their growing fears triggered another war, and the Open Age collapsed.

Check out this Author's Manifesto for more of my inspirations!

III. After the chaos, the world entered into the Golden Age. Prophesies were recorded and interpreted at length before being shared with the landfolk. Though this prevented panic about the unknown, it precluded anyone's ability to decide their fate for themselves. The merfolk became the undisputed knowers of truth, with the landfolk at the mercy of their interpretations. This mirrors the institutions of many human religions, which all claim to be the one true path. Their ideas are not entirely false, but the truths get rolled up in the trappings of other people's interpretations.

The Golden Age ended with a prophesy that could not be interpreted. It was long, convoluted, and heavily debated for decades. As this one crucial prophesy languished unsolved, it began to surface in subsequent, related prophesies. The number of interpreted prophesies dwindled, until eventually the merfolk had no interpretations left to share. This mirrors the scientific discoveries that cannot be integrated into mainstream theology, causing a schism between emergent scientific facts and the long-standing spiritual truths swaddled in centuries of dogma.

IV. Through the Dark Age of the next few centuries, the merfolk of my Tales of the Known World saga began interpreting prophesy once more. However, they'd fallen out of touch with the landfolk, and the mers opted not to share any more prophesy with them. The merfolk swore off all contact with the landfolk, violating their long-standing principles of sharing knowledge freely. Isolated and hypocritical, the merfolk society folded in on itself, placing more and more value on obtaining knowledge about the future, and less value on presence, self-awareness, and joy. This mirrors the world of humans today, obsessed with acquisition and growth, even at the expense of life.

V. The inevitable collapse of the merfolk society ushers in the Free Age, where the landfolk rebuild without the meddling hands of prophesy guiding their fate. Though prophesy is still sought and interpreted, the people of the Free Age place less importance on the prophetic word. Instead, they live empowered lives, creating the future through their decisions and actions - just as we strive to do on Earth.


That's it for this series! Check out my latest inspirations for more.

Download the Author's Manifesto here, or start your adventure below.

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Portent XIV of Broken: a riddle in rhyme

In the novel Broken, there are 24 portents fortelling the events of the unfolding saga.

Start with Portent I here.

These and other riddles in rhyme are gathered in the Portents Directory for you to explore.

Enjoy!

The war of ancients now resumed
No blood for blood or blow for blow
The risen flee the battle low
In terror's grip their hearts forgo
All kin and country doomed

By nerves betrayed and sense attuned
The master culls the rank and file
Through powers elf beseeched revile
Lest all of earth and sky defile
With careless mortal wound.


Can you decode the future Tales of the Known World?

Share your interpretation!
Comment below with your take on this portent.

This foreboding portent comes to pass at the end of Broken, when two vast armies clash on Allana's shores. What is the war of ancients now resumed, and who is the master that culls the rank and file?

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Download the Prophesy Appendix:

The merfolk culture is built on the prophetic Gift. Nearly all men produce a portent every twenty days, and they devote their lives to interpretation. For more about the role and inner workings of prophesy, check out the Prophesy Appendix above.

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Alongside every prophesy is an attribution block. This block contains a byline giving the name of the person who said the prophesy, and a dateline giving the day the prophesy was first said. Here is the attribution for this portent:

Nrohgi Kwnyeh Gusya XVI
2:3:3:2/5, III:IX

The portent attributed here has not yet been interpreted. It was said recently, and it will be repeated every twenty days until either it is correctly interpreted, or it comes to pass.


That's it for this post! Up Next: With dawning day to empress go...

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