Advanced Vocabulation

Worldbuilding with Language

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

I want to make some more words, but I have a couple threads I want to pull on to get to them.

First: What’s in a name? Names have meaning. What do the names in Atlantis mean? What are some other common elements of names?

Second: Conversation. Let’s figure out how to ask “Where are you from?” such that someone can answer selad Atalantis.

While I am thinking about it, I need to clean up how I distinguish vowels that are pronounced differently. If I don’t mark them then I’ll use the English pronunciations and that will mess with my phonetic inventory.

A Digression about writing systems

How words get written down is important. You can’t just use symbols and accents willy-nilly, because they all have a linguistic meaning. I am struggling with a few sounds that are somewhat subtle, and I’ve been distinguishing them by putting them phonetically in [brackets] as you saw in the previous episode. Let’s clean them up.

A → “Ah” as in “Atlantis” → IPA (a)→ Atlantean “A”
I → “ih” as in “Atlantis” → IPA (ɪ) → Atlantean “I”
A → “Ay” as in “Atreus” → IPA (e) → Atlantean “Æ”
E → “ee” as in “Atreus” → IPA (i) → Atlantean “Y”
U → “uh” as in “Atreus” → IPA (ɐ) → Atlantean “U”
A → “Ah” as in “Barthemus” → IPA (ä) → Atlantean “AA”¹
E → “Eh” as in “Barthemus” → IPA (ɛ) → Atlantian “E”
O → “Aw” as in “Nauthilion” → IPA (ɑ) → Atlantian “Ạ”²
O → “Oh” as in “Roachiim” → IPA (o̞) → Atlantian “O”

So to recall the word we already have, it is something like Selaad Atalantis. I think that makes sense so far!

Conversational Atlantean

Now we’re trying to get to the question, “Where are you from?” And we’re going to think of variations of the answer: “I am from Atlantis” we already have, but what about “I am an Atlantean” or “I am of the Atlantean people”? These are slightly different takes. There’s a lot going on here!

Step 1, we are going to look at our basic question words—who, what, when, where, why, and how. And we need to consider what form a question sentence takes.

In English, you form a question by reversing the order of some words. “You do be like that, though.” → “Do you be like that though?” The first two words get swapped around, and consider also the vocal inflection when you are speaking these two sentences—the first inflection falls and becomes lower, the second inflection rises and becomes higher.

In English, we get our question words primarily from German, who use words like wo (where) or warum (why). Latin, French, Spanish—romance languages—all use Q: cuando (when), que (what). We are taking from Indo-European, imagining some pre-romance celts put some pontoons together and got somehow to a lost continent in the middle of the Atlantic. Q isn’t a sound we took into our phonetic inventory, though we do have “K” and we do not have “W”. Let’s use K but find a way to make it sound Germanic, then we’ve got kind of a hybrid system here.

Who → Kor
What → Kaar
When → Ken
Where → Kurr
Why → Kạm
How → Kym

So we have “Where” and we also have “you are” and we also have “from”. We could arrange them but we have no way of distinguishing between “Where you are from” and “Where are you from”. Both would be Kurr solaad. There’s two ways we could go—a tonal answer (say “where you are from” with a rising inflection to indicate a question) or a grammatical answer (move the components around to indicate this new intent to the words).

I’m partial to the grammatical method. There’s two options that present themselves. We could move the preposition “from” aad to the question Kurr so it reads “where from you are?” but that breaks our verb rules. What if we moved the verb ahead of the question so it reads “you are from where?” That feels most natural to me. Solaad kurr?

Imagine this conversation:

“Solaad kurr?”
“Selaad Atalantis.”—see I like this already, it has some nice alignment between question and answer. The place implied by “from” always comes after the word modified by “from”. So Atlantis and Where are fulfilling the same grammatical role—fulfilling the preposition. I like the congruency of the verb “to be” as well, it feels like the same word in both cases.

What about other answers to the question? I am especially interested in “I am an Atlantean” because it means making an adjective form of the proper noun Atlantis and it means creating a form of the verb “to be” that indicates something different.

Before I approach this, I want to tackle a different thing, because I want to wrap my head around nouns in general before I use special noun situations. Let’s take the sentence “I like the book”. This is a different verb, too!

To like, or approve. In Spanish and in Latin, this is related to “gustar”, in french and german it is related to love—lieben in german, aime in french. Our infinitive verb ending is -rel remember so “to like” in Atlantean might be something like “gusurel”.

I like → gusel
You like → gusol
He/She/It likes → gusil
We like → gusuger
You all like → gusugor
They like → gusugil

And then we need the noun, the book. Nouns will have case (nominative, genitive, etc); nouns will have gender (libro), nouns will have inflection (singular, plural, honorific?).

Nominative case is the generic “the book” so let’s stick to that. I think Book should follow spanish on this one, something Libro-esque.

Let’s make book lypre. The “e” marks the word as masculine, and the -re marks it as nominative, and the root will be lyp. Plural will add “sh” so one lypre, many lypresh. (SH is one phoneme, treat them like one letter).

I like the book → Gusel lypre, and I like the books → Gusel lypresh.

Adjectives follow the noun they modify, so if it was “I like the black book” it might be Gusel dakre lypre. This is almost like saying “I like the black the book”…I’m not really strong on how adjectives work here. Lets leave it at this and see how it plays out and I can adjust as we go. (I just decided dak = black because it sounds kind of like dark. I might change this later, completely thoughtless and arbitrary).

So now we have enough to talk about an adjectival form of Atlantis.

Selaad Atalantis is “I am from Atlantis”, Atlantis being a proper noun, needing no real modification. Proper Adjectives I just realized are a different thing so would be treated differently.

In Latin there was a common ending, and even in English we use “ian” or “ese” or “ish” to adjectivize proper nouns. So we just need an ending that works in the same way in Atlantean. For some reason -set came to mind. That would make “Atlantean” in Atlantean Atalantset which I think sounds cool.

So “I am atlantean” is Sel Atalantset.

What if you said “I like Atlantean books”? That would be Gusel lypresh Atalantresh—the adjective atlantean is modifying the noun books and has to match in case and number, so I think Atalantset only counts when it is used in the context of people.

How would you say “He is atlantean” vs. “He likes Atlantean books”?

Sil Atalantset → He is Atlantean
Gusil lypresh Atalantresh → He likes Atlantean books.

What’s In A Name

Names have meaning. Every name means something. Bartholomew is a hebrew name, Bar meaning “Son” and Tholomew being a form of Tolmai, which itself means “abounding in furrows”. German surnames are fairly common— Schmitt (blacksmith), Bauer (Farmer)—occupational.

First names include patrilineage (Son of) or something religious: Joel → Lord is God; Elijah → God is lord (EL being the element that means God, Jo/jah being the element that means Lord).

I contrived my names without thinking about their meaning, so what are some names we have?

Barthemus, Mathilde. Mathilde is obviously derived from Matilda which is germanic for “mighty in battle”. Barthemus shares some elements with Bartholomew. Bar would make sense as “son” but that is hebrew so a little too far removed from our Celto/Germanic/Romance roots.

So lets contrive new meanings to these elements.

Themus could mean “son of” and “Thilde” could mean “daughter of” which would be cool. Son of Bar, Daughter of Ma.

Let’s say Bar is short for Baral, a name which means “favored one”—Bar meaning favored, al meaning one. So Barthemus means son of the favored one, in a literal sense, but colloquial means that he is son of Baral, the previous King.

Mathilde means Daughter of Ma, short for Malas, which means, lets say, “full of joy”, the components being Ma, Joy, and las, full.

Whoa, that’s a lot of words

Right, let’s take a moment to refresh our lexicon. I’ll make a separate page for this at some point.

al - (root) one, a specific thing
aad - (prep) from
Atalantis - (prop n) Atlantis
Atalantset - (adj) Atlantean
bar - (root) favor
Baral - (prop n) “favored one”
dak - (adj) black, dark
esrel - (v) to be
gusurel - (v) to like, approve
kam - (pronoun) why
kaar - (pronoun) what
ken - (pronoun) when
kor - (pronoun) who
kurr - (pronoun) where
kym - (pronoun) how
las - (root) full
lyp - (root) book
ma - (root) joy
Malas - (prop n) “Full of joy”
natis - (root) sea
tal - (root) people
themus - (root) son of
thilde - (root) daughter of

And there’s still some names to disambiguate and other things to do, but we’re at a point where we can start deriving words and perhaps start a naming language! We need to dig into nouns too and talk about other cases that exist in Atlantean. How would you say “I liked Baral’s book”? We need a possessive case for nouns!

More to come on this but i’m going to slow my roll and be a little more deliberate, I’ve been firing these off without rhyme or reason and I’m worried I’m overloading subscribers.

Thanks for sticking with me on this!

AJPM

1. Yeah it looks like a diphthong but there’s no way around it. I’ve got 4 variations on the letter A so that’s why I’m running into problems. AA = Ah, just remember that!

2. I know I said not to just throw accents and symbols on either but come on I have 4 letter A’s I need 3 variations of the same letter! Gimme a break here! The official sound of this letter is not included in Atlantean so I feel comfortable it will not cause confusion.