| Language | Details |
|---|---|
| (Strait's) Common | This is the most frequently used trade tongue (outside the Intsnef Canyon). It evolved from the languages of each of the warring visitors in addition to the local tongues. Written Tergan uses a simple phonetic alphabet inherited from one of the newcomers' languages. |
| Amdurian | Also called Amdur Dwarven, this is the traditional language of the dwarves and peluman. The portions of the Amdur Plateau nearest to the volcano speak Amdurian as their common trade tongue. It uses its own phonetic alphabet with optional dots and ticks around the letters representing vowels, and features a pharyngeal consonant (like clearing your throat). |
| Azik | The language of the dwarves brought by the war, more commonly found by the Free River Valley. Azik uses its own runes when written, though given that the majority of dwarves still speak the old tongue of Amdur, it is just as common to see Azik written in Amdurian characters. |
| Canyon Common | Since Donaire itself stopped evolving ages ago, residents of the Intsnef Canyon actually speak their own "common" language, a creole taking pieces of Donaire and Yahku. Thanks to a lack of standardization, this creole has multitudes of dialects and a very rich vocabulary, featuring words from all other languages, including trade tongues and cants. Canyon Common is always written in Donaire. |
| Donaire | Donaire is the ancient language of man and the common language of the gods. While most cultures standardized on other languages, the Intsnef Canyon region did not, stubbornly clinging onto the gods' tongue. For this reason, Donaire is mostly an academic language outside the Intsnef Canyon, but it is still spoken alongside Canyon Common in those parts. Written Donaire uses a large alphabet of detailed phonetic and logographic pictograms. Unlike Amdurian, there is no formal way to indicate vowels since the logographs imply enough context to determine the word. There are two written alphabets, one with intricate detail for formal occaisions, the other being a simplified version for quick scribing. |
| Uzgok | The language brought by the gnolls when they entered the Tergan lands in the Age of Seph, this language has since evolved from a very glutteral tongue to one with more in common with Yahku than any other language, in part due to the influence of the glizzins. While Old Uzgok had its own writing form, almost none of the gnolls in the Age of Seph were literate. Uzgok is most commonly written using the common alphabet, though it is not rare to find it written with the Yahku system. |
| Yahku | The language of the lizardfolk, this language has much in common with Donaire and Amdurian, including the use of pharyngeal consonants. Areas near Slazzil tend to speak this language in place of a common tongue, so it is rare to find an inhabitant of Slazzil that speaks anything else. Using its own phonetic alphabet, Yahku writing has different representation for most letters based on where it is in a word, making for a beautiful flowing script. |
| Dimpka | The kreen tongue, lacking labial consonants for their lack of pliable lips, and instead having a set of sub-glottal chords that sound somewhat similar. Other races describe these alien sounds as clicks and hums that are similar enough to the labial sounds "p," "m," "b," "f," and "v" that learning the Dimpka language (or having a kreen learn another race's language) is not impossible. There is no written form of Dimpka as its speakers have difficulty holding writing implements, so texts are most commonly written in common or Amdurian. |
To give Tergie a realistic feel, real-world languages from the Middle East (and regions that affected it) were used. J.R.R. Tolkien, a linguist, created this genre of "high fantasy" and wrote his famed books solely as an exercise in developing and evolving languages; in order to have a legitimately mature fictional language, he needed a history and a collection of peoples with which to develop it. Of course, he wasn't without imagination or good company (he and C.S. Lewis were good friends), but the depth of his world was the crowning acomplishment that kick-started the genre, and that would not have been possible without solid linguistic roots. To that end, Tergie has painstakingly thorough levels of detail in this area, and I have a large number of bilingual dictionaries on my shelves. Any word you see used here comes from another language, either directly, or informally (contracting several words together to form a pleasing-looking new one).
This is common. For practicality (word puzzles, etc), it's whatever language the game is actually played in. ... as to why in heck that should be American English, look, a flying garbage truck! ... or perhaps on a more serious note, the invaders of the Mystic Age brought their own languages. Azik was known by the dwarves, perhaps the more used tongue resembled English. From a linguistic position, it must have strong influence from Donaire, Amdurian, Uzgok, and the Mystic's crew's tongue.
Dwarves in Tergie take much from ancient Judean life ... in a dwarven way of thinking, of course. They're still miners, and much of their life is spent underground, but instead of mountain dwellings, they are in the desert. When a big sandstorm hits, they simply retreat to the mines that they work regularly anyway. The Hebrew language is very well suited for this task, given how before the state of Israel was established in 1948, it was a dead language, frozen in historic significance and unbiased from 2000+ years of linguistic evolution.
Azik comes from the original history created for the world, in which Athasian (Dark Sun Campaign Setting) invaders to a new world battled with Cerilian (Birthright Campaign Setting) defenders accidentally brought along for the ride. Azik is derived from the Anuirian nation of "Baruk-Azik," the most prominent playable dwarven kingdom in the base set (which itself is ironic, because that's the wrong side of the Cerilian continent from where I was taking history from). In naming things, I look to Tolkien, the master linguist and father of traditional medieval fantasy, for inspiration. This means the Azik language is essentially Old Norse, though thanks to a trusty Tolkien Dictionary, I can actually pull words from a "real" dwarven language.
I suppose this is influenced by my observation of evolving languages, specifically English and the Hebrew-Yiddish relationship. I use the concepts of pidgins and creoles in all of the trade tongues, including Canyon Common, to illustrate the diversity and dynamic abilities.
Unlike the Romance languages, English lacked standardization for ages, with completely inauthoratative (at best) dictionaries until 1755. Even then, hard standards and conventions were largely avoided, which makes English dreadfully difficult for a non-native speaker. This lack of standards makes it difficult to introduce new words and uses to the language. A native English speaker from Dubai might find a dialog with native English speaking Texan all but impossible.
The other major concept used here is borrowed from Yiddish. Hebrew was a dead language, used only in prayer until it was revived in the mid-twentieth century; for a thousand years, Hebrew was completely cut off from evolution and adaptation, and it was even largely seen as impolite to use it outside of religious purposes. Instead, its speakers used Yiddish, which was essentially the insertion of Hebrew words into the region's Germanic vernacular, written with Hebraic characters. Similarly, Donaire is a dead language, and though it is still used, it lacks vocabulary for concepts and items brought by the Age of the Dragon, and it has inefficiencies that other languages have discarded. Canyon Common is so unregulated a language that it doesn't have a name; it's just what people speak. It is filled with borrow-words from Donaire, but it has a rich vocabulary inherited from Yahku and other tongues. Like English (and very much unlike trade tongues), Canyon common has an enormous vocabulary.
The language from the Intsnef Canyon, home of the Humans. This is taken from Ancient Egyptian. Development of the Tergan Archipelago has evolved from a single land mass that looked almost exactly like Egypt into something radically different, but you can still see that influence in the Great Strait (originally modeled after the Nile) and in the Intsnef area itself, also modeled after the Nile (and Native American cliffside cities like those of the Ancient Pueblo "Anasazi").
Uzgok is Uzbek, the official language of Uzbekistan. Uzbek is largely derived from Russian, Turkish, and Arabic, making it perfect for use here; "Old Uzgok" would roughly be a proto-Russian tongue, and after the influence of evolving alongside Donaire and Yahku, it would become more Arabic in nature.
Reading Cyrillic is hard! I know enough of the Greek alphabet from math classes to be a bit dangerous, but with a lacking of Russian and other Cyrillic tongues, some of my transliterations may be further off from the minor altercations intended. An interesting note, the Uzbek language is officially moving to a Latin character set now that they're free of Soviet control, but this will take a while (and it doesn't change the fact that my Uzbek-English dictionary is still in Cyrillic).
The language of the lizardfolk swamplands, Yahku takes its language from Arabic. The Arabic word for "ruby" is "yaaqoot." The lizardfolk consider themselves the "ruby people" wheras the humans are emeralds and the dwarves are diamonds. Each has its beauty, but as the world's magic and power are fueled by the red "snef," ruby plays an important role for the lizardfolk, despite the further scarcity of diamond. (One should also note that dwarven craftsmanship is not contested, and the lizardfolk see the strength of a diamond in dwarven products.)
Kreen lips are not as pliable as those of most other species, so they have difficulty with consonants formed in that part of the mouth. On top of this, there is an extra chamber at the base of their larynx that is capable of making clicks and hums that can approximate these otherwise lacking sounds.
I was not able to find much by way of bi-directional dictionaries for African tongues that included clicks (like Zulu), and it appears that most labial consonants (b, p, m, f, v) are used in every language; there certainly is no language that lacks both B and P sounds, so I had to come up with a clever way around that. The book I found was on Igbo, a native Nigerian tongue, which has a sound that I am not opposed to (I didn't want something too influenced by recognizable languages, nor something too easily confused with Arabic or another language I had already chosen, and I purposefully avoided European languages so as to provide some contrast between this and other places. Additionally, I wanted to avoid melodic tongues like Finnish for its similarity to Tolkien's elves). Igbo has certainly taught me a bit about linguistics and Nigeria, so there's benefit there, too.
... there aren't any yet, though like with Azik, I intend to utilize Tolkien's works. Unfortunately, outside the elven tongues he created, there isn't much, but I can always hit up the used book store or look online if needed, plus minor racial languages are less significant, so perhaps I could just make them up.
Search engines tend to pick up random unrelated things ... I expect that at some point in the future, somebody will come to this page and be completely baffled by its intent. Perhaps it will open wide the worlds of imagination found in non-computerized Role Playing Games like Dungeons and Dragons, perhaps it will annoy linguists, or perhaps it will produce a smile on visitors' lips as they jump back to their search results for something more applicable.
All content copyright © 2003-08 by Adam Katz unless otherwise noted. All rights reserved. Page last updated Sat Nov 29 15:33:44 2008.