15. Language and naming
Partial Language Module – Specification; Morphology Outline; Naming Outline; Melodic Channel; Writing, Sound Change and Descent.
Phonetics, morphology, names and piped languages as in version 1. New, all built:
- Vocabulary: 371 concepts (was 316). The gaps against WT’s core lexicon are filled: sky, day, season, year, past, future and the seasons; kin; offices (ruler, warrior, priest, smith …); craft (tool, weapon, bow …); lore (writing, law, magic, spell, curse, omen …).
- Sound change: 32 laws as operations on features, drawn in proportion to time; borrowing fitted to the borrower’s sounds.
- Descent: a tree of languages following the tree of cultures. Daughters inherit, blends mix, rulers and ruled exchange words by the contact’s influence, and different species do not borrow.
- Writing systems: the type follows learning (tallies, pictographs, logographic, syllabary, alphabet, abugida, abjad) and the language’s shape. The medium gives tool, style and direction. A piped language is written as notation. Charts of signs.
The sound families of the default (decided and built 19 October, Decisions Log §21): Humans speak languages of the fantasy-human family (almost Indo-European, exotic), Elves fantasy-elvish (elegant: Celtic, Latin, Finnish, Japanese), Dwarves and Giants fantasy-gruff (Germanic, Slavonic, Hebrew, Greek, Armenian, Georgian, Persian; Dragons and elemental spirits too, once they have data), Orcs, Trolls, Ogres and Goblins fantasy-harsh (Semitic, Turkic, Caucasian). A family sets a palette of sounds, leanings, a grammar and a naming style; every culture still draws its own language within it, spoken with its race’s body.
Still to build Syntax, the Eventide sound laws, the evolved people's language
- Syntax is not built (word order, noun phrases, relative clauses, phrases beyond one inflected verb).
- The Eventide sound laws (great consonant shift, a-merger, rhotacism) are not yet written as data in the variant, nor is the Avya composite script.
- The evolved people’s founding language reads its body plan in the wiki export, but wiring the hand-off’s body plan into
buildLanguageis the last step still open. - Still missing: allophony, suppletion, numerals and classifiers, family names, tonogenesis, epenthesis and metathesis, the full lexicon.