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edenfallingFrom the department of random world-building:
1. Color Symbolism of the Church of Three
I wrote a fic about Firshome last week, called Against the Flood, in which I mentioned a mosaic of a religious symbol: a stylized silver wave in a circle, on a background of blue, green, and purple tiles. The wave-in-circle is the symbol of Nesta of the Waves, one of the three deities of the Estarian Trinity. (The other two being, of course, the Serpent and the Star.)
The thing is, those are not the colors most people would use to represent Nesta. Her main colors are blue and red, because she is not just the goddess of water. She's also the goddess of birth and death and blood.
The Serpent's colors are green and orange, for earth and fire. (He also has brown and yellow, as Nesta has purple and gray.) The Star's color is white, though that's generally twinned with black to set it off, and since black is also a "pure" color -- pure darkness, as opposed to pure light -- it has become an unofficial secondary association over the millennia.
Anyway, it interests me that Maranea designed a mosaic that ignores half of Nesta's symbolism. She's trying to have beauty without pain. This fails, of course, but I am now wondering if there's a smooth way to explain in that fic about the missing element of her mosaic, and why it adds a bit of painful irony to her loss and initial denial of that loss.
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2. The Names of the Gods
The Serpent and the Star presumably have names, but those names are either not known or too sacred to use. Nesta seems to be an exception, but actually her "name" is a contraction of Nemes Esta, which means "Mother Star" in Old Estaran (the ancestor language of Common). The Old Estaran form of "the Star, the Serpent, and Nesta of the Waves" is tar Esta, ta Malek, on Nesta far te Vessil.
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3. Some Notes on Old Estaran
Old Estaran is a Vanadian, or Eastern Estarian language (Akhite, if you will), but heavily influenced by the Fiarin languages of the Mekhul River delta where Eloriel and her band of followers settled and built their holy city. The Akhite influence shows up in basic grammar, while the Fiarin influence shows up in a lot of loanwords, and also an interesting distinction where -an refers to something relating to Estara-as-a-place, while -in (which is a Fiarin form) refers to something relating to Estara-as-a-people. The latter form became associated specifically with things relating to the Empire, and the distinction between place and people has been lost in modern Common. (It still exists in Fiarin languages, though, which are among the few old Estarian languages that survived through the centuries of Imperial rule.)
Estara is from Esta-alla (or, in a dialect variant, Esta-ara), the homestead or city of the Star: Star City, Startown, even Starborough, if you will. Estaria is from Esta-arya, meaning the country or land of the Star, or, alternatively, the country/land of (i.e., dominated by) Estara. (In Akhite languages and dialects, incidentally, the letter Y is pronounced as a consonant when followed directly by a vowel. If it's pronounced as a vowel -- the long I of "fine" -- it's separated from the following vowel by an H. For example, Svedanya is pronounced Sveh-dan-yah, while Melkyha is pronounced Mel-ky-ah. The H is mostly silent. Under the influence of Fiarin pronunciation, -arya elides to -aria, and later to just -ia, with the I pronounced as the long E in "me.")
Old Estaran has a grammar with marked similarities to modern German, except with only one definite article. The definite article does change depending on noun case (which you can see in "the Star, the Serpent, and Nesta of the Waves" above -- the first two are nominative case while the third is dative case), and in all cases the definite article adds a terminal -r when preceding a noun that begins in a vowel.
I am not sure if Common still marks cases by changing definite articles and adjective endings. This is because I always 'translate' Common as English -- I have never included 'untranslated' words or phrases the way I have with, say, Arhadikim and Hlaenish. But Common is not actually English, and I do try to remind myself that it's not English... though I am not as good at remembering that as I ought to be. *sigh*
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4. A Few Thoughts on Translating Imaginary Languages
Because Common has a background grammar at least somewhat similar to German (and therefore not too dissimilar to English), and because I have made up a fair bit of grammar for Arhadikim (which is not similar to English), it's not too hard for me to figure out the grammar points that are most likely to trip Ekanu up as she's learning Common. If she sounds convincingly as if she's speaking a second language, that's why.
It's harder for me to find the stumbling points when Ekanu is speaking Pythran with Ain, since I have not done any work on creating Pythran as a language. The one thing I have noticed is that she seems to misplace time-related words in her sentence structure, which suggests to me that Pythran (and therefore either other Harulin languages, other Yanomese languages, or maybe both!) treats time-related words -- especially modifiers -- differently from other modifiers. That interests me. I'm not sure what it might mean, but it's definitely interesting.
1. Color Symbolism of the Church of Three
I wrote a fic about Firshome last week, called Against the Flood, in which I mentioned a mosaic of a religious symbol: a stylized silver wave in a circle, on a background of blue, green, and purple tiles. The wave-in-circle is the symbol of Nesta of the Waves, one of the three deities of the Estarian Trinity. (The other two being, of course, the Serpent and the Star.)
The thing is, those are not the colors most people would use to represent Nesta. Her main colors are blue and red, because she is not just the goddess of water. She's also the goddess of birth and death and blood.
The Serpent's colors are green and orange, for earth and fire. (He also has brown and yellow, as Nesta has purple and gray.) The Star's color is white, though that's generally twinned with black to set it off, and since black is also a "pure" color -- pure darkness, as opposed to pure light -- it has become an unofficial secondary association over the millennia.
Anyway, it interests me that Maranea designed a mosaic that ignores half of Nesta's symbolism. She's trying to have beauty without pain. This fails, of course, but I am now wondering if there's a smooth way to explain in that fic about the missing element of her mosaic, and why it adds a bit of painful irony to her loss and initial denial of that loss.
-----
2. The Names of the Gods
The Serpent and the Star presumably have names, but those names are either not known or too sacred to use. Nesta seems to be an exception, but actually her "name" is a contraction of Nemes Esta, which means "Mother Star" in Old Estaran (the ancestor language of Common). The Old Estaran form of "the Star, the Serpent, and Nesta of the Waves" is tar Esta, ta Malek, on Nesta far te Vessil.
-----
3. Some Notes on Old Estaran
Old Estaran is a Vanadian, or Eastern Estarian language (Akhite, if you will), but heavily influenced by the Fiarin languages of the Mekhul River delta where Eloriel and her band of followers settled and built their holy city. The Akhite influence shows up in basic grammar, while the Fiarin influence shows up in a lot of loanwords, and also an interesting distinction where -an refers to something relating to Estara-as-a-place, while -in (which is a Fiarin form) refers to something relating to Estara-as-a-people. The latter form became associated specifically with things relating to the Empire, and the distinction between place and people has been lost in modern Common. (It still exists in Fiarin languages, though, which are among the few old Estarian languages that survived through the centuries of Imperial rule.)
Estara is from Esta-alla (or, in a dialect variant, Esta-ara), the homestead or city of the Star: Star City, Startown, even Starborough, if you will. Estaria is from Esta-arya, meaning the country or land of the Star, or, alternatively, the country/land of (i.e., dominated by) Estara. (In Akhite languages and dialects, incidentally, the letter Y is pronounced as a consonant when followed directly by a vowel. If it's pronounced as a vowel -- the long I of "fine" -- it's separated from the following vowel by an H. For example, Svedanya is pronounced Sveh-dan-yah, while Melkyha is pronounced Mel-ky-ah. The H is mostly silent. Under the influence of Fiarin pronunciation, -arya elides to -aria, and later to just -ia, with the I pronounced as the long E in "me.")
Old Estaran has a grammar with marked similarities to modern German, except with only one definite article. The definite article does change depending on noun case (which you can see in "the Star, the Serpent, and Nesta of the Waves" above -- the first two are nominative case while the third is dative case), and in all cases the definite article adds a terminal -r when preceding a noun that begins in a vowel.
I am not sure if Common still marks cases by changing definite articles and adjective endings. This is because I always 'translate' Common as English -- I have never included 'untranslated' words or phrases the way I have with, say, Arhadikim and Hlaenish. But Common is not actually English, and I do try to remind myself that it's not English... though I am not as good at remembering that as I ought to be. *sigh*
-----
4. A Few Thoughts on Translating Imaginary Languages
Because Common has a background grammar at least somewhat similar to German (and therefore not too dissimilar to English), and because I have made up a fair bit of grammar for Arhadikim (which is not similar to English), it's not too hard for me to figure out the grammar points that are most likely to trip Ekanu up as she's learning Common. If she sounds convincingly as if she's speaking a second language, that's why.
It's harder for me to find the stumbling points when Ekanu is speaking Pythran with Ain, since I have not done any work on creating Pythran as a language. The one thing I have noticed is that she seems to misplace time-related words in her sentence structure, which suggests to me that Pythran (and therefore either other Harulin languages, other Yanomese languages, or maybe both!) treats time-related words -- especially modifiers -- differently from other modifiers. That interests me. I'm not sure what it might mean, but it's definitely interesting.
