The Eldraeverse

…building civilizations with my space elves in space.

Tag Archives: eldraeic

Dialects

Leave a Comment Posted by on April 22, 2013

The distinction between the three generally accepted primary Eldraeic dialects is both informal and quite simple:

“Low Eldraeic” is the language as it is actually spoken day to day, using the common-sense medium of language features and vocabulary that are of use to most of the people most of the time.  (It’s still complex and formal by most language’s standards, but it has had most of the rough edges and unnecessary complexity in its native speakers’ eyes rubbed off it.)

“High Eldraeic”, on the other hand, is the language with every idiosyncracy, grammatical feature, additional functionality, and pedantic technical distinction put together by the Conclave of Linguistics and Ontology over generations, for reasons technical, philosophical and political, in play.  It is used lightly in scientific and technical documentation where it aids in clarity, brevity and accuracy, more heavily in formal ritual, high-falutin’ rhetoric, and particularly grand opera, and most heavily when one speaker in a conversation wishes to browbeat another about just exactly how much better educated, more intelligent, and generally superior they happen to be.

“Trade”, the third dialect, is the worn-down and bastardized form of the language used widely by non-native speakers who learned it from other non-native speakers, or who found themselves reduced to stammering confusion after taking a mnemonetic course and wondering just how the heck they use all these registers and modes and affixes and non-temporal tenses in practice, and just what is an evidential anyway?

Conlang , ,

Trope-a-Day: Eloquent In My Native Tongue

Leave a Comment Posted by on February 7, 2013

Eloquent In My Native Tongue: Eldraeic native speakers tend to come across this way, tending to be either stilted and concise (if they’re aware of it and overcompensating for that by grotesquely simplifying everything, Eldraeic being, ah, very enriched in language features indeed – an approach which is somewhat shameful, but possibly the best compromise they can manage between perfection as defined as accurate communication and perfection as defined as proper use of the foreign tongue) or verbose, over-precisely and redundantly qualified, and pedantic (if they’re simply letting the translator run away with it) in other languages.

(See also: Call a “Smeerp” A Rabbit, Curse of the Ancients, I Do Not Speak Nonverbal, Japanese Honorifics, Mathematician’s Answer, Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness, Sophisticated As Hell, Spock Speak, Starfish Language, and Translator Microbes.)

Trope-a-Day , ,

Trope-a-Day: Translator Microbes

2 Comments Posted by on February 6, 2013

Translator Microbes: More or less ubiquitous, in one form or another, and pretty much essential to sustaining galactic culture. Advanced cultures use neuroprosthetic translators, which are embedded directly into the language center of the brain (or are software run on more sophisticated brain implants) which provide real-time translation between ear and thought, thought and mouth, with a thinker-class AI to provide seamless, real-time (you hear the alien language; you just understand it), and meme-level translation; less advanced ones rely on handheld devices, or translators built into clothing or jewelry – which repeat, rather than go in real-time – and lower standards of translation quality.

Either way, there’s no such thing as a “universal” or “self-teaching” translator; the translators generally require the software and database package (the “linguistic corpus”) to be obtained and installed for every language you expect them to handle, and producing those in the first place requires a lot of time and work from professional linguists.  Fortunately, two people with translators that both work to/from “Trade” – for all intents and purposes, a simplified Eldraeic I  pidgin – can communicate enough for most simple purposes.

Trope-a-Day , , , , , , ,

Trope-a-Day: Spock Speak

1 Comment Posted by on February 5, 2013

Spock Speak: …partially.

To some extent, it’s the nature of the language.  Eldraeic doesn’t have contractions (although some words are coined as portmanteaus, more or less), and is designed to match the preferences of its creators (by both species and profession) for low-context, high-precision communications (spurred on, perhaps, by the universality of contracts and/or the nature of, say, spacer or underground society not rewarding sloppiness of mind at all) – or, circumstantially, to provide plenty of scope for wordplay, circumlocution, necessary etiquette and protocol, and occasional out-and-out wilful obscurantism.

(Also, indeed, the tendency of the Empire’s supply of rampaging intellectual elitists, meaning everybody, to prefer $5 words and up.)

While it and its speakers are quite capable of jokes, sarcasm, slang – although the slang would also qualify, by and large, as high-precision, low-context – and metaphor, at least the last three are flagged explicitly by register (and, in metaphor’s and some slang’s case, by grammatical particles); and while it is not required by the language, a care for mélith and appropriate management of one’s valëssef does tend to lead to underplaying of emotions (despite the language’s rich attitudinal/affective vocabulary) except in moments of stress or exceeding frankness.

And ixéren (“indeed”) is indeed a Very Popular Word.

No Ludicrous Precision, though.  Ludicrous Precision is, ah, imprecise.  (And see also Sophisticated As Hell.)

Trope-a-Day , ,

Trope-a-Day: Sophisticated As Hell

2 Comments Posted by on February 1, 2013

Sophisticated As Hell: The rather sophisticated system of registers and inflections for differing degrees of politeness and formality in Eldraeic would make this sort of thing really quite easy to pull off, for native speakers, and so it seems a crying shame not to use it on appropriate occasion.  Translating it both faithfully and realistically into English, on the other hand, could be something of a bugger.

Trope-a-Day ,

Trope-a-Day: Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness

1 Comment Posted by on January 31, 2013

Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Inasmuch as Eldraeic is a language axiomatically optimized, grammatically and lexicographically speaking, for maximal precision and minimal ambiguity in the transmission of information while simultaneously permitting undertakings of verbal ludosity and operating successfully in minimal-context, including cross-cultural and polyspecific, environments, and maintaining properly exquisite mathematico-philosophic elegance, it’s really damn hard not to play this straight.  Especially, given the high percentage of its speakers who do this sort of thing simply because it’s fun.

Subverted, however, inasmuch as it not only has a bastardized pigeon for use by non-native speakers who don’t care about being looked down on, but also an officially-grammatical “clipped” dialect for when you need to say things like “Look out!  Truck!” or “Fire the torpedoes!” or “Eject!  Eject!  Eject!” right the hell now.

Trope-a-Day ,

Trope-a-Day: Mathematician’s Answer

1 Comment Posted by on January 30, 2013

Mathematician’s Answer: The nature of the Eldraeic language, being designed as it was by mathematicians as well as logicians, philosophers, and linguists, positively encourages these. (So does the cultural attitude in favor of precision and in disfavor of the sloppy speaker and the plain intellectually inadequate.)

In fact, if asked a literally-translated “Is it A or B?” question, the only possible grammatical answers are “Yes” or “No”. If you really want to ask a question of that form – say, “Would you like tea or coffee?”, the way you say it in Eldraeic is “You would like tea how-related-to coffee?”, to which the answer is “neither…nor” (if you want nothing), “but not” (for tea), “not…but” (for coffee) or “and” (for both), any of which options can be expressed in a single conjunction.

(For a real-world example of this unusual grammatical form, this is also how Lojban does it.)

Observers of the modern Conclave on Linguistics and Ontology are unsure whether they’re saddened or delighted by how much this and other quirks of the language annoy and frustrate less precision-devoted non-native speakers, but they definitely aren’t planning on changing them any time soon…

Trope-a-Day , ,

Trope-a-Day: Japanese Honorifics

1 Comment Posted by on January 29, 2013

Japanese Honorifics: Obviously don’t exist per se, but Eldraeic has just about as many honorifics, and uses them every bit as often – non-native speakers are advised. This makes much Eldraeic speech seem excessively formal in English, but then, most native speakers of it are a formal lot.

Trope-a-Day ,

Cultural Tells of Language

1 Comment Posted by on August 26, 2012

This came up on the conlang/conculture mailing lists:

Ursula K. LeGuin writes some really gorgeous stub-languages into her fiction.  In a lovely short story called “Dancing to Ganam” in her collection A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, I paused to earmark this:

“Tezyeme,” he said, which meant something on the order of “it is happening the way it is supposed to happen.”

These little philosophical bells in a language always make conlangs more believable and immersive to me – telling the philosophy and culture of a people through the use of language.

What are some examples of words like this in your conlang(s)?

And I thought my answer might just be worth repeating here:

Eldraeic has a few of these.  Probably the most notable are the seven or eight words which they use to describe the innate and/or desirable characteristics of their mindset: coválír, estxíjir, mélith, talcoríëf, teir, valëssef, and valxíjir, none of which map precisely onto English/human concepts, even if some of them can get pretty close:

coválír might be translated as propertarianism, but really has the meaning “property as an extension of the self”; mélith, I gloss as “balance and obligation”; talcoríëf is literally “cold-mindedness”, but depending on context, it could reasonably be glossed as “rationality”, “self-mastery”, or “self-knowledge”; teir could be approximately glossed as “honor” or “self-integrity”; valëssef as “divided selfness” or “polymorphic identity” – the multiple social identities one has, and the need to keep them separate both mentally and in dealings with other people,even when you have two different relationships with one person; estxíjir as “wyrd”, “destiny” or “devotion to ideals”; and valxíjir as “uniqueness”, “excellence”, “will to power”, or “forcible impression of self onto the universe”.

(Most of these are covered in rather more detail on one of my trope-a-day pages, here, so I’ll link rather than repeat myself at great length.)

Oh, and estxíjir and valxíjir combine to create qalasír, which one might approximate as “will”, more adequately translate as “driving energies of the individual”, or casually gloss as “a soph’s got to do what a soph’s got to do”.  They also give rise to the slang term jír - approx. strength of will, courage, boldness, chutzpah, etc., and to jírileth, liberty – a “life of will/volition-use”.

Which brings me onto another one of those cultural tells: daráv, meaning literally “sophont” – which I gloss as “soph” in informal speech, for the right feel – and used in Eldraeic as the generic word for ”person” – without any reference to species, gender, sex, race, etc., etc. unless explicitly added.  Also found in compounds like daryteir, “person of honor”, “gentleman” — er, gentlesoph.

Hm, other examples.  There’s the term for an Imperial citizen-shareholder, or at least the short term that’s a lot quicker to say than “Imperial citizen-shareholder”; valmiríän, which ambiguously means both “ordered self” and “self who sets in order”, and probably reveals a decent amount about their self-concept in so doing, and its opposite, ulvaledar, “unbound-person”, which means “foreigner” but defines that as “not signatory to the Contract and Charter”.

I’d add the classic series of insults - ”Defaulter”, “slaver”, “parasite”, “dullist”, “cacophile”, or “entropic”, but I have not yet translated most of those, except for “dullist”, which is ulsúnadaráv- one who finds lack of the Nine Excellences and their concomitants laudable, or at least non-condemnable; so not technically “one who does not strive to shine”, rather, someone who thinks that there’s nothing wrong with that.  And there’s zakhrehs (“barbarian”), which while it doesn’t actually say that the thus called are guilty of specific and enumerated acts of coercionism, infiduciarity, theft, mooching, wilful culture-lack, destructionism, disharmony and chaos, implies that they like that sort of thing really hard.

Oh, and if I wax political for a moment, their taxonomy of polities.  The principle top-level division of móníë (polities), after all, is that between telelefmóníë (oath-consent states, Societies of Consent – by which they mean anywhere where the social contract is explicit and voluntary) and korasmóníë (force-states, where it isn’t), the latter being in turn primarily divided into talkorasmóníë (autocracies, “true-force states”) and sémódarmóníë (democracies, which charming word means “mutual-slave states”).

I’ve got some fairly telling metaphors, too, but they came up in my English-writing forms and I haven’t translated most of them yet.  Except for these different kinds of dilemmas, I think.

And if noodle words count, this.

Conlang , ,

Trope-a-Day: Constructed Language

Leave a Comment Posted by on August 8, 2012

Constructed Language: Both in and out of universe, Eldraeic is a constructed language.

In-universe, it’s a constructed language designed as an interlingua for the Empire by the Conclave of Linguistics and Ontology, with additional requirements for regularity, unambiguity, cultural neutrality where matters other than The Fundamentals are concerned and linguistic imperialism where they are, maximal flexibility, designed to allow the greatest scope for creativity, and simultaneously to promote logical reasoning and precision, and designed to be expressively isomorphic in multiple forms.  This heady list of requirements was then tackled by a group of linguists, philosophers, logicians and mathematicians, whose work and arguments produced the language we know today.

Out of universe, it’s also a constructed language, albeit an unfinished one (and given its claims to universality, a perpetually unfinished one – I don’t have the nose to produce the olfactory-description features it inherited from the dar-bandal, for example, never mind some of the real esoterica it’s acquired from various other Starfish Languages).  Nor, while I can describe in great detail its 36-character alphabet — well, 3.5 alphabets (for pen, brush, and chisel, the additional half being a variant on the brush alphabet for scratching with claws) and dozen or so phonologies (for different speech apparati, including things like radio and chromatophore matrix), do I actually have them all terribly well defined.  Nonetheless, it’s constructed enough that it is possible to say things in it, and even – having participated in a conlang relay or two – for other people to understand what was said.

Type-wise, it’s somewhere between “complete original” and “foreign conversion” – originally, I started using Loglan/lojban as a base, but it’s grown up to be a very different language (it uses case tags than place structures, for one thing, along with many other affixes, and handles a lot of shared features differently, and comes with a lot of different or at least differently implemented features).  And it’s nothing at all like English, certainly!

Trope-a-Day , , , ,

Trope-a-Day: Starfish Language

2 Comments Posted by on August 7, 2012

Starfish Language: Oh, plenty of them.  Esseli native language, for example, is encoded on RNA strands (although fortunately they can and are more than willing to add extra speech organs as required).  Mirilasté language is also notable for using sequences of musical notes as its “phonemes”, and volume and tempo are as linguistically significant as pitch.  Seb!nt!at and various other solar clades, along with the galari‘s techlepathy, tend to use dialects designed to be transmitted electromagnetically and which translate very poorly into audio.  The qucequql and thegas-giant dwelling sssc!haaaouú use bioluminescence and chromatophores to display changing bands and patterns of color as a form of “speech”.  The mezuar communicate chemically, but primarily communicate through direct neural linkage where their roots and branches grow together.  Myneni communication has both a chemical dialect and one based on a very flexible chime-and-whistle audio generation that most more conventional larynxes can’t manage.  (And the uplifted dogs, of course, retain a certain facility for scent-based communication.)  The nsang communicate principally by writing with spinneret material, in two-dimensional ideograms, augmented by gestures for simple or immediate concepts.

Of course, that’s just the first layer.  Once we get into the difficulties of coping with higher-level grammatical quirks of the language: galari is structured like hypertext; digisapience communication is often discrete heavily-internally structured concept formats designed for packet transmission as high-speed data pulses (“here, have a wiki-database of my communication”); the múrast and embatil, as collegiate intelligences, throw out the tree-structure of most languages in exchange for matrix-hashes – and the mirilasté, curiously enough, use something more like a stack – seb!nt!at is a quantum language, in which it’s possible to tell three stories at once and then collapse the meaning at the end of the sentence; native whale, although fortunately not standard dar-ííche, doesn’t have sentences, but rather indefinitely long songs – whose individual phrases are even more long-winded than Entish – in which everyone can talk at once (their audio-processing brain finds resolving the threads of conversation trivial) and, indeed, modify each others’ sentences on the fly…

…and the difficulties of relatively simple issues like non-gender genders, attitudinals (very important, since They Do Not Speak Nonverbal), evidentials, context-dependent or referential concepts, alien metaphors, different methods of categorization or metaphysical perspectives on time, space, and reality – things get very weird very quickly.

Even Eldraeic, which was designed as a lingua franca for a polyspecific polity, suffers from this – since due to its ecumenical nature, it includes a very, very large set of optional grammatical features designed to cover as many of the quirks of the above languages as possible, a mode-switching grammar, three alphabets, an ideographic representation, and multiple isomorphic dialects to be spoken in different environments and with different apparatus, including underwater, over digital communications channels, by color, and even with nothing except pause and interval.  Speaking pidgin Eldraeic (which is to say, Trade) is easy – but speaking many of the more complex forms is very much not, and its capacity for willful obscurantism is generally acknowledged to be unparalleled.

Trope-a-Day , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Trope-a-Day: I Do Not Speak Nonverbal

2 Comments Posted by on August 6, 2012

I Do Not Speak Nonverbal: Due to the number of different species running around with radically different – and hence unrecognizable, without a lot of practice, and never instinctive – expressions and body language, it is generally a good idea to assume that no-one around you speaks nonverbal.

This is also why Eldraeic, its simplified trade pidgin, and most other commonly used interlinguae come with attitudinals as a basic language feature – and with good translators, voice of elcor abounds, as do other means of conveying one’s emotional states.  (Although, for the most part, I “edit this out” as part of Translation Convention, since I suspect most readers would find it… irritating.)

Trope-a-Day , , , ,

Trope-a-Day: Call a Smeerp a “Rabbit”

1 Comment Posted by on July 2, 2012

Call a Smeerp a “Rabbit”: Another unfortunate aspect of Translation Convention.  As described under Taxonomic Term Confusion, Eldraeic has a means of classifying – and words for – species-groups classified by homology alone, so that people can talk about the winged flying creatures that exist on multiple planets easily – without having to resort to a bunch of tedious explanations about “bird-analogs”, especially when there’s not a single ecology of origin for everyone to get their analogs from anyway.

Unfortunately, English doesn’t.  Which means that, footnote it as I might, “trees” includes many things that are not part of kingdom Plantae, “birds” includes Elieran four-winged flyers, “fish” includes Phílae’s armed – um, arm-possessing – fish-analogues and Revallá’s tubefish, and so on and so forth.

Trope-a-Day , , , , ,

Trope-a-Day: Call A Rabbit A Smeerp

Leave a Comment Posted by on June 29, 2012

Call A Rabbit A Smeerp: Almost inevitably, thanks to Translation Convention, and purging of jargon and dialog of obvious Earth-culture references, like, say, “Sorcerer’s Apprentice Problem” and “Newtonian mechanics”.  Although at least most of the time, it is trying to indicate some subtle difference: making the distinction between “agorism” and “capitalism”, for example, the latter being a loaded term for most potential readers.  And the oft-referenced bandal, for example, isn’t quite the same animal as the Earth dog (although sharing a common origin; see under Ancient Astronauts again), due to their short separate evolution and breeding for different qualities, as you can tell from the size difference, greater paw-manipulation ability, and larger braincase.

Trope-a-Day, Writing , ,

Trope-a-Day: Translation Convention

3 Comments Posted by on June 28, 2012

Translation Convention: Applied – with a degree of selectivity, in which I translate names that are meaningful based on roots in modern Eldraeic (i.e. “Mosstone”, “Stonesmight”, “House Silverfall”, “House Steamweaver”, etc.), but leave untouched those derived from older languages.  Occasional pieces of the actual Eldraeic are left in for effect, where useful, or where words have no adequately exact analog.

Trope-a-Day, Writing ,

Eldraeic Vocabulary (1)

Leave a Comment Posted by on June 9, 2012

By request, since I’ve seen a couple, here’s the dictionary of all the canonical Eldraeic words so far – canonical in this case meaning they’ve appeared in a fic or trope here or have otherwise been concretized.  (Yes, I have more words written down here, but everything’s subject to change except these.)  I’ve omitted a few species names and other proper nouns, as well as some grammatical particles, and the current version of the words’ place structures, but everything else should be in this list:

!tesh: ant
a!déra: bluelife animal of Eliera, resembling an indigo-furred, hexapedal woodchuck
aelva: beautiful/aesthetic (distinct from attractive)
Ailék: phonetic name for letteral “A”
alaer: ocean
alath: knowledge (as distinct from data)
alathciera: “weave-of-knowledge”, encylopaedia
aldamanyr: eikone, deity
aléla: motion/move
alírvelv: eel-analog native to Eliera
altáné: mother (performer of maternal role, not necessarily genetic or brood mother, or indeed female)
anan: you/you and those you speak for
anquan: negligibly, to a negligible degree
argórén: a tuberous Elieran vegetable
arien: the largest piece of Imperial coinage; 6 esteyn
aril: light (also dark when reversed with ulquor)
árkal: causal connective: causally resulting in, thus
astrar: (Selenaria) governor of a province’s subsidiary city
azik: stone (substance)
balchárn: hunter/to hunt
bandal: dog/domesticated canid
caile: leaf
cálen: green
calma: little/small
cap: logical connective: AND
cerrúr: four-horned hexapedal browsing animal, native to Eliera, used for riding
chalánlél: pulley (“wheel that moves things not itself”)
cháldar: a nanodrug refined from pithed sophont mind-states
chalél: wheel
charét: axle
chelír: a short non-rhyming triplet poem, of similar form to the senryu
chimbrí: like, be fond of
cikril: silverlife pseudoplant of Eliera
cikrieth: swamp/littoral variant of cikril
cisatar: (Selenaria) provincial governor
coronargyr: “Emperor’s merit”; that quality of authority conferred on a ruler by competence and granted proxies of the ruled that enables them to rule
coválír: propertarianism, the conception of property as an extension of the self
covalth: understanding of a concept
daër: game
daranan: you and others
daráv: person / sophont
darbandal: uplifted sophont dog/canid species
darcúlnó: uplifted sophont octopus species
darëssef: social role; the function you presently serve
darííche: uplifted sophont cetacean species
daryteir: “sophont of honor”; gentleman (although applies equally to any sex in the Imperial context)
deless: to like/love as a friend
delesessqámél: approximately, friend-with-benefits
dhaith: afraid
dimar: (Selenaria) governor of a district of towns and villages
dúran: darkness (with a sense of presence of malice; for simple absence of light, see aril)
ei: particle introducing names
ékaláman: “wyvern”; hexapedal flying carnivorous reptile with mid-legs turned into wings
el: particle introducing simple descriptions
elar: temporal tense: past/was/then/before
eldré: eldrae
elén: particle introducing mass descriptions
eloé: particle introducing set descriptions
esklav: hot drink produced by an infusion of beans; neither coffee nor chocolate, but not entirely dissimilar to either
espré: “pronoun assignment”; also known as
essa: create
esteyn: the base unit of Imperial coinage
estrev: “boss”; informal
estrevikh: “boss”, with sense of “master”; derogatory.
estrev-i-ráyestrev: “boss of bosses”, overboss; informal, usually criminal slang.
estxíjir: wyrd/destiny/devotion-to-ideals/dharma
falsan: black
fíäríën: tree
fidúr: blue
filwé: small four-winged songbird of Eliera, noted for its brilliant white plumage
galrás: meat
Gilek: phonetic name for letteral “G”
Hacek: phonetic name for letteral “H”
hain: war
hanat: home/domicile/dwelling/lair
hanrian: the second of the traditional two swords; resembles a Roman gladius
harisan: runner/to run
harnis: vehicle (generic)
hasérgalrás: the meat of the hasérúr
hasérúr: a hexapedal, browsing, bluelife Elieran animal used for meat and milk
highént: difficult
hyúman: human; this word, of course, doesn’t actually exist in the language, but I include it to illustrate how it would be transliterated into Eldraeic orthography
iandaër: a strategic battle-simulation game, similar to both chess and shogi
ictoch: lit. “glitch”; colloquially, any annoying thing that you need to work on
idaharis: progress
idar: temporal tense: future
iébel: evidential: statement is hearsay, from the speaker’s perspective
intáné: father (performer of paternal role, not necessarily genetic or brood father, or indeed male)
ithréth: a four-dimensional stone-placement (similar to go) game
ítavir: yell/scream
jír: (slang) approx. strength of will, courage, boldness, chutzpah, etc.
jírileth: liberty (primarily in the negative sense; technically, a maximised phase-space of individual volition)
kal: polished gemstone used as a currency token
kálan: center, middle, midpoint
kecbal: animal
kerc-rakhel: “miserable prey”
kesseth: a lettuce-like vegetable of Eliera
kimaes: jar-sold sauce for plain food; similar to “ketchup”
kírasseth: the most complex Eldraeic game, involving multiple boards of play, cards, dice, and mechanical computers, self-referential, with an astonishingly broad base of symbolism
kirsunar: “most brightly shining”, supreme
korásan: “forceful one”; an aristocrat who governs by “right” of force
kórasmiríë: order imposed by force
korasmóníë: force-state; nonconsensual society
kveth: ass (body part)
kveth-lakh: that which comes out of the kveth (informal, perjorative)
lakhass: to die
laras: word
larileth: “sigillary”; a tile-placement game similar to Earth’s mah-jong, based on combining rune-constructs
leir: mist
léran: “observer of the civilities “; a non-citizen-shareholder who, nevertheless, respects the principles of the Fundamental Contract
lethis: living thing, to live
líhasúr: a quadrupedal greenlife rooting animal, native to Eliera
lin-runér: a coordinator of coordinators; to the runér as royalty is to nobility
lin-vandthel: the cold, black rage that leads to terrible deeds
líril: singer, to sing
lorzh: trapper, to trap
lúekha: a sea-bottom “hot smoker” worm native to the ammonia oceans of the qucequql homeworld
lumenis: the “shilling” of Imperial coinage; 1/24 esteyn
mahar: maker, to make
mélith: balance and obligation
meressif: the “gentle arts”; the formalities and skills required to move in Imperial high society
miríë: order (as opposed to chaos and/or entropy)
mírlathdaër: a rule-manipulation game (similar to Nomic), popular among AIs
móníë: polity
múléth: a plum-like fruit native to Eliera
múratmiríë: order born from cooperation; emergent order
múrcét: night; the night half of the daily cycle
nalathdaráv: “unknown-person”, stranger
nall: none
nalrí: neuter (person or animal)
naratis: temporal tense: now & ongoing into the past and future; i.e., now and for all time
nekhalyef: a quadrupedal grazing animal of Eliera, used primarily for meat and milk
nérí: male (person or animal); man
nérissí: hermaphrodite (person or animal); herm
nissí: male (person or animal); man
olman: container, to contain
ómith: an elementally-themed card game with additional dice-controlled variations
qal: this here, a nearby object
qalasír: driving energies of the individual
qan: degree qualifier: syllabic numeral appended indicated degree by twelfths
qané: degree qualifier: to a small degree
qaneth: degree qualifier: to an average/usual degree
qanlin: degree qualifier: to a large degree
qel: that there, a medium-distant object
qil: that yonder, a far-distant object
qildaráv: person-from-yonder; stranger, foreigner
quel: good (general sense – moral, pleasing, aesthetic, functional, etc.)
quor: degree qualifier: absolute presence, completely, extremely
raicve: “rotting” (pejorative sense only)
reshkef: a hexapedal browsing animal of Eliera, used for meat, milk and wool
rian: blade (weapon)
rijsevas: wedge (“double-sided inclined plane”)
rijvas: inclined plane
runér: coordinator/harmonizer, a local executive in the Imperial government
saejas: screw (worn-down “circular inclined plane”)
saeris: crystal
sarai: judge, assess
sekánlél: lever (“stick that moves things not itself”)
seklar: arrow (weapon)
selenis: the “penny” of Imperial coinage; 1/288 esteyn
serren: shellfish, native to Eliera, whose shells have been historically used as currency
sessilar: binary metaphor
sessq: to have sex (mutually; takes a group term or list as subject)
sémódarmóníë: mutual-slave state; democracy
sétavir: converse (among a group)
sevesúr: a two-winged greenlife game bird of Eliera
sunar: bright/shining
talcoríëf: “cold-mindedness”, rationality, self-mastery
talis: true/truth
talkorasmóníë: true-force state; autocracy
taltis: smallest Imperial coin; 1/1152 esteyn
tavir: to talk (to)
teir: honor/self-integrity
teirquel: moral goodness/ethicality
telalél: wind
telalélharn: hovercraft
telelefmóníë: oath-consent state, Society of Consent
telir: sky
thunimidár: “faded person”, middle-level supervisory operative; criminal slang.
tiryef: a large flightless bird of Eliera, raised for meat
uldaráv: p-zombie
ulquor: degree qualifier:  nonexistent, absolute absence, zero
ulsúnadaráv: “dullist”; one who finds lack of the Nine Excellences and their concomitants laudable, or at least non-condemnable
ulvaledar: “unbound-person”; non-Contract signatory, foreigner
urlis: false / untrue (not implying a lie, just not logically true)
urlisdaër: “false-game”; a game whose purpose is to cheat
val: I / I and those I speak for
valanan: you and I
valdar: I and others, we but not you
valdaranan: you and I and others
valëssef: divided selfness/polymorphic identity
valmiríän: “ordered self” and “self that sets in order”; Imperial citizen-shareholder
valxíjir: uniqueness/excellence/will to power/forcible impression of self onto the universe
vandthel: anger
var: temporal tense: present/is/now/at
xaról: a night-purple flowering shrub native to Eliera
yalcet: to curse
zahúën: big/large
zakhrehs: barbarian

That’s all there is for now.  I’ll post more when it builds up again, in the course of fics future.

Conlang , ,

Go Not To The Imperials For Counsel

Leave a Comment Posted by on May 24, 2012

“The word which is commonly translated as ‘Imperials’, referring to any of the Empire’s citizen-shareholders, is valmiríän in the original Eldraeic; curiously, it is not cognate at all to that nation’s formal name. From its roots, it could have the meaning either of ‘ordered self’ or of ‘self that sets in order’.

When asked if one translation or the other comes closer to the intended meaning, the valmiríän, infuriatingly, always answer ‘Yes’.”

- The Great Powers and Their People, University of Eö Press

Fic-a-Day , , ,

Linguistic Oddnesses

1 Comment Posted by on May 3, 2012

In official Eldraeic, there is a single word – not hyphenated, even – which means ‘one who creates a forced-growth cross-gender clone of him/herself, imprints the brain of said clone with an animus/anima-inverted fork of his/her own mind-state, and then proceeds to marry his/her new duplicate’.  (There is also a parallel word that refers to following this same procedure with a same-gender clone and a non-a/a-inverted fork.)

Having established this, we can now make the following four deductions:

1. That when you put over a trillion sophonts together, even the most weird people and socioforms get their own words.

2. That however weird you might think yourself to be, you’re almost certainly weak beer in comparison with what is, statistically, quite a large number of people.

3. That Eldraeic, as a language, is more agglutinative than any language has a right to be.

4. That it’s probably a good thing that it’s quite a long word.

Fic-a-Day , , , ,

The Horns of a Trilemma

1 Comment Posted by on March 11, 2012

an-lorzhár íren-eloé aldamanyr – lit. “trapped between the gods”; this expression indicates that one is caught in a particular type of dilemma.  Recall, if you will, that in mainstream eldraeic belief the deities are iconic, partially-personified representations of fundamental principles: creation, knowledge, trade, love, invention, war, and so forth.  Thus, one who is “trapped between the gods” faces a dilemma not merely in choice-optimization, but in which of two dearly held principles in conflict they must adhere to, and which defy.

See also: an-lorzhár íren-eloé rian, “trapped between blades”, for lesser dilemmas where one must optimize for the least bad option, and an-yalcetár eloé qanlin quel, “cursed with an abundance of good things”, for those lesser dilemmas in which one must optimize for the best choice among mutually exclusive goods.

- A Treasury of Eldraeic Metaphor

Fic-a-Day , ,

Author’s Notes: Food and Headlines

Leave a Comment Posted by on February 18, 2012

Which is to say, on this and that:

On the first, just a quick linguistic note, concerning the name of the Thousand Scents Road.  Eldraeic has two words which could be glossed as “thousand”, because it has two systems of numbers.  The “traditional” system, and the “syllabic” system, in which each of the possible digits are encoded as a syllable, and the syllables are simply strung together in digit order, most significant to least significant, to produce a number word for absolutely any number.

Neither of these, however, represents 1,000; the Empire uses base 12, if you recall?  (Or were prompted by the As and Bs you saw in the street numbers; although obviously their own digital system has unique symbols for 10 and 11.)  They represent 1,728.

The compromise translation convention I have settled upon is that where syllabic numbers are used – which in the modern era means for virtually all mathematical, scientific, and commercial purposes – it’ll be translated accurately, as 1,728 – or higher multiples as appropriate.  But there are plenty of places where “thousand” is simply used as a metonym for “a great many”, such as in the name of the street in question; no-one has actually checked how many perfumiers and products there are along its length, but it’s certainly not exactly that, and probably is a great deal more.  Fortunately, these are also the places where people would tend to use the traditional numbers, for reasons of euphony, and so, I feel free to translate that as “thousand”, since Thousand Scents Road conveys the intended meaning to the human reader much better than 1,728 Scents Road.

This, incidentally, is also what high-quality machine translation, of the kind that most travellers and aliens abroad use in the setting, does with them.

(Also, for those curious, a reshkef - and that’s pronounced approximately rehs-h’kef where the apostrophe represents a glottal stop – is a meat, milk and wool animal most closely analogous to a six-legged browsing sheep.)

On the latter, just some comments regarding the Infoclast.  When I was going over the draft with my lovely wife and beta reader, she remarked that some of their phrasings seemed a little off, for serious news reporting: the “now annual tradition” of the Voniensan diplomatic protest, for one, or the “laughing all the way to the bank”.

To clarify a little, I should perhaps explain that the Worlds’ news media does not, by and large, follow the American tradition of being as serious and objective as possible (insofar as that’s possible; I find it pretty risible myself), but more the fine British tradition that I’m used to of, while reporting essentially the same facts, catering to the slant that their readership would prefer the news to have.

You can get something very close to pure objective news.  The Objective Eye offers that by virtue of being the closest thing possible to completely machine-produced news, with the few sophonts involved in the process having emotion-suppressors and objectivity overlays firmly clamped on to their brains while at work.  Feeds to other news organs aside, virtually all of its small subscriber base is AI who are closer to the machine than most, and even most of those find it stultifying in its steadfast refusal to ever take any position on anything.

Of other major news organs which I currently know about, Imperial Certified Interstellar News is unashamed in its pro-Empire slant and reporting of “happy news”, such that even the people who work there call it “Propaganda Prime”.  The Exchange Times, out of the tradeworld Seranth, takes an editorial position of such strict economic rationality that it makes even other financial papers look like fuzzy-minded hippies.  The Accord Journal (probably the largest news organ of all of them) tries to maintain a position somewhere close to the mean of the entire Associated Worlds, which makes it contradict itself a lot of the time.  The Independent Worlds Router takes no position in the other direction to the Eye, by printing absolutely everything that turns up and complies with their editorial standards and reality, and so contradicts itself all the time.

And the Imperial Infoclast caters to those people who enjoy snarking at positions the Imperial mainstream thinks are stupid and people they think deserve it.

Writing , , ,

← Older posts

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 666 other followers

%d bloggers like this: