Monday, 9 December 2019

Fictional Languages

Sometimes, a single word or phrase in a Poul Anderson text is a springboard to somewhere else, e.g., fictional languages. Tolkien alone imagined:

first, languages;
secondly, people speaking them;
thirdly, a history of those people - in fact, peoples, because they even include different species.

"'Iyan wherill-ll cha quellan.'"
-"Lodestar," p. 399.

This is a single sentence in Planha, the principle Ythrian language. (See Planha Greetings And Birds.) We are not given a translation although we are told the general context.

Now we leap off the springboard. Another imaginative author, Alan Moore, did - in this respect - less than Tolkien but more than Anderson. I will describe it in an ensuing post although it gets a bit complicated.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Pall!

But, what I hav wundered is how the Old Anglic of the 21st centooree morphed into the Anglic of Nicholas van Rijn and later Dominic Flandry's time. Heer I am trying to spekulativly extrapolate ways Old Anglic changed into Anglic. I beleev wun way the langwig will evolve is by many wirds and theyr spellings beeing simpleefyed fonetically. And I beeleeved, in addeetion, that many personal nams were simpleefyed as well. E.g., "Joseph" bekam "Josip," etc. Also, the Anglic of the futer must hav absorbed many loan wirds frum non-human langwigs.

Sorry, I was trying to write a paragraph in what I GUESSED would become the Anglic of Dominic Flandry's time. Needless to say, I'm sure I will be far more wrong than right in my guesses!

Ad astra! Sean