Old Realm language

[Isator Levi]

As part of my job, I check the spelling and grammar of a wide variety of scientific papers in subjects I know little about. Sometimes I can't even tell whether a word is a verb or a noun.

There's this fun bit in The Knick where a bunch of characters try to read a medical paper in lieu of having to actually consult with the surgeon who co-wrote it (since he's black) and are frustrated to find that it's in French; one of them tries to enlist his wife to translate, and she points out that her finishing school education did not include any kind of medical jargon (and snarks that if he wanted a menu there'd be no problem). Later on the doctors try to translate it themselves, and run into the problem of a French word that approximately translates as "to cut", but they can't tell how much cutting is being called for. In a surgical procedure.

[Erinys]

Does it use the common Maya idea of glyphs that look like human faces, hands, and feet? If so, those particular symbols must be human inventions.

[The Wizard of Oz]

Indeed, the "old realm characters" in the books are probably not exactly what everyone writes.

[Erinys]

I think the more literal comparison to Chinese characters probably applies to the actual Old Realm glyphs, too.

[The Wizard of Oz]

A bit like how a layperson could read a scientific paper and recognise it all as English because the syntax and sentence structure and some of the words are all familiar and comprehensible, and yet have no idea what any of it is actually saying.

As part of my job, I check the spelling and grammar of a wide variety of scientific papers in subjects I know little about. Sometimes I can't even tell whether a word is a verb or a noun.

On the subject of the meaning of Old Realm, I've also thought of Chinese characters, simplified vs traditional. Both sets of characters technically mean the same thing. But studying traditional characters (if you understand them), there's a lot of hidden meaning, and the etymological history, in the small extra lines and slashes that aren't in the simplified version.
Old Realm might well be like that: for most humans who used it, they were using the simplified version, but for the Primordials (and maybe some gods) each word had layers of extra meaning and connotations the humans missed.

[Erinys]

That is awesome.

I have in my mind that there are different dialect groups, or forms, that Old Realm takes. The original is the Primordial Speech. The simplified form of this was built into the essence of devas, gods, and elementals, and they are born knowing how to speak it (unless they are so unintelligent that they can't use any languagre.) Because they are born with the cosmic language already part of them, there is no unintentional, unconscious lingusitic drift that would create separate dialects. Differences arise only by deliberate changes (like what you describe the Celestial gods turning their speech into.)

Humans and other material races, with their great limitations and in many cases their need to actually learn a language, evolved new dialects of this language. This was in addition to whatever new languages were created for or by them, such as the Dragon Kings' High Holy Speech. Some of the human dialects evolved into the Old Realm dialect, which eventually evolved into separate languages (Autochthonian, Low Realm, and High Realm).

The Infernal dialect is different. Not because of lingusitic drift -- although the Yozis have experimented with giving their progeny deliberate alterations, and Elloge is endlessly inventive -- but because the Yozis and demons are broken. Their mutilation extends so fundamentally into their essence that it has changed the way they must communicate, and the speech they are born knowing. The Yozis and the souls which remember being devas are just as painfully aware of this mutilation of their essence and holy speech as they are of their other mutilations, but they cannot actually produce the Primordial dialect anymore, even though they understand it.

Because of this, the Brass Dancer does not sing and prefers to dance to wordless music. He often kills those who sing words where he dances.

[Isator Levi]

I've got this image now in which the Old Realm that even the most learned human savants, and even a lot of the gods, would sound to the Primordials about as crude as the mumblings of a child (which doesn't necessarily preclude them being compelled by it, because you don't always need to be articulate in order to be moving; it can even be an obstacle). Just this idea that to the Primordials, if you can't speak the language with an entire choir of voices, accompanied by the music of a body that moves like geological formations and weather patterns, and a mind that can make sense of multiple sources of sound simultaneously, you're not hearing it the way it was meant to be spoken (or sung, as was often the case, and is part of why their music is beyond compare).

Not even as an idea of some kind of essential, magical language, just thinking about the implications of elaborate and exacting terminology and nuances of meaning and the use of tropes (in the original, literary meaning of the word). Not just about the idea that some things don't translate between languages, but that there can be people who speak the exact same language who still don't understand each other.

A bit like how a layperson could read a scientific paper and recognise it all as English because the syntax and sentence structure and some of the words are all familiar and comprehensible, and yet have no idea what any of it is actually saying.

I have this idea that there are vast reams of vocabulary in Old Realm that is known only to the Yozis not only because they're the only ones who ever think in terms to which such words can be applied, but they're the only ones who are really capable of speaking them. That a Yozi could inscribe a pictogram that would be recognisably Old Realm, but would be so layered and complex that hardly any human and most gods would be incapable of reading it.

This all coming from a sense of Old Realm not really as a magical language (although it is a highly effective language for describing magic*), but just a language as it would come to the kinds of being who might compose a world and be worlds themselves, to give sound and structure to their own thoughts and a means to convey them to their fellows. Something that the raksha heard, and found to their liking and so appropriated so deeply that it became essential to them (even if their speaking of it would be strange even to the Yozis, all bizarre idioms and shorthands and extremely convoluted allusions and the occasional nonsense word that they think makes them clever), and that the gods were made with or instructed in so that they could report to their masters and comprehend within reason their orders (and that many of the modern Celestial gods have turned into a form of backhanded statements, veiled meanings and nigh-incomprehensible official and executive jargon and spin, such that hardly anybody says what they mean and even when they try to they wind up using so many buzzwords and roundabout sentences that it still comes off as a block; a lot of Terrestrial gods have just become kind of rustic).

This is not to say that the use of Old Realm by the Realm of the Exalted was unsophisticated, just missing out on a few things, and that knowing the language is not the sole obstacle to being able to navigate the intricacies of Yu-Shan or uncover the mysteries of the Yozis. Also maybe a bit of a basis for it gradually drifting into the modern High Realm.

I've been reading a bit of Tolkien lately.

* I also have this mostly unrelated image of Ligier producing some device, maybe a fighting suit of brass armour that is bound to a particular royal bloodline, in which he needs to take the time while making it to describe how it works (in the sense of all the caveats and conditions of what it can do and will do and how it can be called or commanded and who is the owner of it), which winds up being fairly complex but could be conveyed even in a lot fewer words in even a human's understanding of Old Realm (although Ligier also speaks most mortal languages, because he doesn't want uncertainty about what the capabilities of his devices are to serve as an obstacle to their use).

[Erinys]

Lots of Sanskrit, Latin, and Japanese words seem to fit in pretty well.

[hippokrene]

I'd go with Farsi

https://youtu.be/A-QOg-tFApA

Or Hindi

https://youtu.be/4OmfLSL5cvU

I'd do the latin/greek mashup for High Realm.

[Totentanz]

I think I remember that Fair Folk start out speaking Old Realm. Not because they've been around so long, but because it's a language literally written into the fabric of reality, and so when they adapt to that reality, they get the language along with it.

So, not only was it invented by the Primordials, they literally build it into the world.

IIRC, it's just The Speech. The Primordials didn't so much invent it as they knew it when they came into being. In that respect, it's much close to Enochian in some fantasy cosmologies where that refers literally to the language of creation itself, rather than the first human tongue.

But, it's been a long time since I read that stuff.

I'm no linguist, but the best cheat I ever found for distinguishing Old Realm was to poke around on the 'net and throw together some Greek, some old English, and some Latin, then toss it in a blender. It sounds enough like something that it tantalizes most native English speakers.

[Dusk Shine]

I'm pretty sure it was what the Primordials invented to talk to each other.

I think I remember that Fair Folk start out speaking Old Realm. Not because they've been around so long, but because it's a language literally written into the fabric of reality, and so when they adapt to that reality, they get the language along with it.

So, not only was it invented by the Primordials, they literally build it into the world.

[Blaque]

There are also some ability to mesh things, as a note. Mnemon has an initial character if I remember right that's the ME and NE symbols side-by-side.

And stuff.

[Erinys]

More about the orthography and the letter X:

Let's decouple the English/Latin spellings from the syllabary. The (High Realm) syllabary only has these consonants:
B CH D F G H K L M N P R S T W X Y

Out of the consonants I'm using so far, there are no letters for /ng/ /sh/ /z/ /th/ (/ŋ/ /ʃ/ /z/ /θ/)
The rarest consonants in my wordlist are /ng/ /f/ /x/ /th/ (/ŋ/ /ϕ/ [͡cç]/[cs] /θ/)
/ʃ/ and /z/ are fairly common.

So what if I say that the Old Realm syllables that became the High Realm syllabary stand for consonantal sounds like this:
B CH..D F G H K L M N P R S T W...X Y
b.ʤ/ʧ.d..θ.g..h.k..l..m.n.p..r..s..t.β/w..ʃ..y

From Old Realm to High Realm /ϕ/ assimilated to either /h/ or to /w/ (along with /β/), /θ/ became /f/, /z/ assimilated to /s/ or to /sh/.
In Old Realm "x" ([͡cç]/[cs]) as the rarest affricate is written KvXv, and /ŋ/ as the rarest nasal is written NvGv. Any time such a pair of syllables would have their vowels assimilated, they do and turn into "x" and /ŋ/
/ϕ/ and /z/ are written with signs absent from High Realm. This is awkward for us (/z/ is common) but plausible, and means only 2 consonants need new syllables, instead of 4. Maybe /ϕ/ is written WvHv instead of having its own symbols, so only Zv syllables are missing from the book.


I tried to figure out if /z/ and /ʃ/ could be allophones, but they logically should mostly fit the same pattern as /ʤ/ and /ʧ/ and they just don't. Important words like Yozi and Yu-Shan break the pattern. :/ Chejop Kejak and Tammiz Ushun are fighting over the phonemes.


Aaanyway, /sh/ could be [ç] and /h/ could be a voiceless bilabial approximant, instead of [ʃ] and [h].

[Erinys]

I figure CH and J may be allophones, always voiced before back vowels (except after /n/) and unvoiced before front vowels (and after /n/). That allows them to be spelled with the same symbols.
Likewise V is pronounced [w] before back round vowels, and in Infernal also before /a/.

The above rules only change the apparent pronunciation of the consonants in 3 gods' names.


EDIT: Playing more with your vowel assimilation rule, and banning clusters that I don't like, I get this set of allowed clusters:
gr mb ml mr my nd nh nj [nʤ] nt nz ngg [ŋg] nk ([nk]/[ŋk]) lk lm ln lr lp lsh lt lv [lβ] lz rk rl rm rn ry rs rv [rβ] pr kr kt

Of those only /gr/ can be the start a word. The rest are always medial, on borders between syllables.
None can occur at the end of a word, neither can some single consonants like j/ch.
Any combination of nsh, ksh, dn, kn, nk, ng, rg, rp, dr, tr, tl, kl, or pl converts to nz, x, nd, ŋk, ŋk, ŋg, gr, pr, rr, rr, lt, lk, and lp. So when those combos in a name are separated by a repeated vowel, and not at the end of a word, it has to be a long vowel.

[nitai]

More or less yes.

There are certain limitations that make sense, like no stop initial clusters, but I need to work on my list a little more before I get anything stronger idea of other limitations.