#alfish conlang

[bumblewarden]

because of how the ancient elves interacted with magic, i think it would be fun if in the modern elven languages, imperative and declarative sentences were grammatically identical, and you have to infer which it was from context

[bumblewarden]

Inspired by a previous post of mine where i headcanoned that Fereldans consider warm to be a flavor, i think it would make sense for Alfish (and Fereldan, the language they got this trait from) to use a different word for warm depending on whether or not you're talking about food

It's a trait in the same vein of how you'll sometimes see languages use different words for an animal depending on if you're talking about the live subject or its meat

From there, i need to figure out how to translate to "warm" in the context of a "warm personality". Both flavors (sweet, sour, bitter) and temperatures (cold, tepid) make sense to describe personality in English. I'm basing Fereldan in Old English, so i don't feel bad about leaning heavily on English secondary meanings

Now, there's nothing saying i can't allow both warms to be used, but i think they ought to mean slightly different things. [Warm– temperature] can carry over the accepted English meaning of a warm personality. Considering the list of things that brings a warm feeling to someone's belly, [warm– food] could be used as a a synonym for affectionate. What kind of affectionate? Well, that's between the speaker and their audience

[bumblewarden]

back on my usual overfocus-on-language-in-the-fantasy-series bullshit. today mixed with extrapolating on da elves being inspired by jewish people.

i don’t speak yiddish. this is from an online dictionary. i sometimes reference yiddish in building my city elf conlang, so i could plausibly import tsores or construct a similar sounding word.

tsores obviously sounds like soris, and soris’s life is one misfortune after another (beloved fail cousin). “-ris” has been demonstrated to be a diminutive ending, so what if soris is just an unfortunate and punny nickname for something longer that started with “so”.

i also headcanon there’s a level like in tolkien’s works of names being internally translated before reaching us the audience to account for any gaps that may show here. more specifically, soris’s name being written with an initial “s” rather than a “ts” because that’s easier for english speakers to pronounce at the beginning of a word.

[bumblewarden]

2, 7, 10 for novhen

[Romanticism Asks]

2. What does your OCs handwriting look like? 

Common, Fereldan, and Alfish (basically Fereldan City Elven) all use runes. The shapes of runes are designed to be carved and haven't yet officially adjusted to paper, so we can't quite reach the nigh illegible cursive he would surely otherwise use

Novhen writes in compact letters. He goes quick on his downstroke, so they also usually show with longer tails with a curve at the end as he moves his quill to begin the next letter.

I've been working on my Alfish conlang, and have the futhorc i'll be using mostly settled, so i can provide an attempt at how he'd write his full name (excluding the endless list of titles he could stuff next to it):

Novhen Tabris ben Cyrion (ᚾᛟᚡᚻᛠᚾ ᛏᚫᛒᚱᛆᚴ ᛒᛠᚾ ᚴᛖᚱᛖᚩᚾ)

(let the ᛒ and ᚱ provide the baseline for where the bottom of the letter is supposed to end)

7. If your OC could meet any historical or past figure, whether in the real world or in their own canon lore, who would it be and why?

Pre-Warden, he'd answer Alidda of Halamshiral. She's plainly badass, and the kind of figure he would lookup to the most as a young boy.

Post-conscription, his answer would change to Garahel because who else is there that could possibly understand what he's been through so completely?

10. What piece of moody poetry or novel quote best encompasses your character?

It's been a while since i've read sufficient moody literature and most of my marked up books are currently lost to storage :[, but i found this quote from the nearest one i had on hand:

"Eine Narb wird bleiben. Auf den Frieden muß die nimmer warten." / "It'll scar. Peace will never come for her." -Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, Brecht (trans. Tony Kushner)

[bumblewarden]

messing around some more with my wip fereldan dictionary bc it makes no sense for the common to be their primary language, and i thought of something fun

i'm drawing heavily from old english in designing this, so i'm optionally appending -cynn (think kind or kin) to each of the race names

and the name for the qunari i started by trying to transliterate it as best i could until i realized qunaricynn or quncynn would sound stupid as hell because qun is way too similar to cynn

that's when i realized i could slap on a classic translation bug

what if the first fereldans who interacted with the qunari thought they were calling themselves the cynn ari, which would be nonstandard to the grammar i'm developing but not so flagrantly wrong as to be unrecognizable

so a fereldan talking casually about the qunari is probably going to refer to them as the aricynn with cunari being used mostly in political and academic capacities, but a singular qunari is almost certainly going to be called an ari

with the other playable races:

no Q's allowed, sorry, it's all being transcribed into anglo-frisian futhorc in the end

(yes my notesapp is messy, but most old english-based words still need to be cross-referenced by a few more dictionaries, so i'm holding off on organizing it)