DISCLAIMER
This is just something that I wanted to try out for fun. It is not supported by lore staff.
On the other hand, it's obviously free for anyone to use to whatever extent they want to.
It is designed as an expansion to this post, and fits onto Drahydra's language headcanon fairly nicely, I think. May add onto/change this as time goes on. As always, any additional ideas are welcome in the comments.
———
This is just something that I wanted to try out for fun. It is not supported by lore staff.
On the other hand, it's obviously free for anyone to use to whatever extent they want to.
It is designed as an expansion to this post, and fits onto Drahydra's language headcanon fairly nicely, I think. May add onto/change this as time goes on. As always, any additional ideas are welcome in the comments.
———
Closest languages to Shalota:
Elven Languages
Daendroque (through Elven)
D'Ithanie (through Elven)
Elven Languages
Daendroque (through Elven)
D'Ithanie (through Elven)
Areas of Commonality
- All the above languages (Elven, Daendroque, D'Ithanie) are quite fluid, flowing languages in different ways. Elven originally was extremely poetic in its pronunciation and the formation of sentences. Tentatively, I'm going to guess that part of this comes from Shalota (due to the overlap of the Meraic Empire and the beginning of the proto-Elven race) in the same way as Daendroque and Ithanian are inspired by Elven. However, big big long Elven style names seem unlikely as a matter of course, as the extreme obsession with intellect and familial purity that spawned these sorts of names in the ancient past seems to be entirely absent in the Maraya.
- So — poetic to a limited extent, perhaps, and flowing fairly nicely like Elven. It's easier to look at Ithanian and Daendroque for any more detail, however, as they have real-life counterparts. Spanish is infamous for its speed, which is largely down to how easy it is to say Spanish words quickly — syllables uttered in Spanish will tend almost always to have uniform lengths, so enunciation is very easy and as such the language can be spoken very quickly without loss of meaning. This may not be the case in Elven but it does seem to be somewhat the case in Shalota, so I'm going to put a pin in that as inspiration.
- IRL French is very good at running words together as Elven would do. Silent letters at the ends of words are often only pronounced in the event that it makes the sentence easier to say quickly. Basically, variable pronunciations in D'Ithanie would help it flow really nicely and may be inherited from Shalota to some extent.
- Handily, Spanish and French are relatively similar as far as languages go, being both Romance languages. That allows me to make broad, sweeping and in all likelihood false statements for the sake of an interesting analysis.
Bearing that in mind, it's time to look at the actual Shalota material we have:
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Shalota
Maraya
Meraic
Tohn Valeer
Tohn Sona
El-Maraya
Tohn Elaya
Ka-Maraya
Tohn Kaya
(Haat-Maraya)
Nol-Maraya
Tohnsa-Ka-Meraic
---
SyllablesShalota
Maraya
Meraic
Tohn Valeer
Tohn Sona
El-Maraya
Tohn Elaya
Ka-Maraya
Tohn Kaya
(Haat-Maraya)
Nol-Maraya
Tohnsa-Ka-Meraic
---
Immediately, I notice the lovely short syllables. Syllable length is not as completely uniform here as it tends to be in Spanish, so we can expect the speaking to be a little slower-paced if still quite speedy by most people's standards — however, weird vowel combinations like aou and eiou should in general be avoided, as they would be extremely uncommon if present at all in this sort of language. Furthermore, generally, vowel sounds should be accompanied on one side by a consonant sound. For example, kashaneimala. Adding some variation, you might come up with something like Kashlaneimahl. Already sounds fairly Marayan, and only one rule has been applied!
Sounds
It's important also to look at the most common sounds, and that's what I did above. Vowel sounds like eye, ay, ah and awh seem to be the most common, with less common occurrences of eh, ee and oh (as in capital O). Common consonant sounds are M, L, R, N, Y with middling K, C, T, H, SH, V. Unlikely consonant sounds would be ones like CH, TS, G, GH, etc. H can sometimes be added before consonants for flavour (e.g. Tohn) but for the sake of simplicity would be silent.
Furthermore, words seem to start most of the time with vowels such as awh, ah, eh, as opposed to ee or eye or oh. E.g. Tohn Valeer (Tawhn Vahleer), Maraya (Mah-raayah), Elaya (Eh-laayah). This coincidentally tends to place the stress on the second syllable, so as a result of that and the tidy syllables, extended sentences or prose in Shalota would be very rhythmic and would flow naturally—sounds about right.
Word Length
Words seem to be fairly uniformly short, and often conjoined onto other words to augment meanings — e.g. El-Maraya, Tohnsa-Ka-Meraic. So, long words and names could potentially be formed with use of word-joining, as well as suffixes and prefixes which seem also to be used (e.g. Tohnsa). However, using this system alone would be very difficult, as words would get extremely long depending on how niche the thing you're talking about is — which is not good. To say something like reeds, you might combine the words for water and grass, but what about to describe pearls? Shiny.. water.. stone? How do you differentiate it from Aquamarine? Blue shiny ground rock?
Wording
For the sake of simplicity there would have to be simple names for things, especially more complex things like Vaults, which seem to be called Tohn(s). Many verbs would probably also have to have basic names. However, suffixes, prefixes and conjoined words could still be used in normal conversation, giving rise to a seemingly poetic mode of expression. This habit may carry across to a limited extent to Common, with Maraya conjoining words for the sake of expressing more complex ideas, or ideas they don't know the name for in Common. A few examples might be night-sadness (unprompted melancholy), fodder-folk (commoners) and winter-book-flood (the mass of books you receive at Wintertide each year).
More to come? Maybe?
As a small side note, the IRL accent I see fitting with all this the best would be a mild, slightly modified Jamaican accent. Do with that what you will.
