Arcanum Paterfamilias/Estvarya: Ishvaran Glossary -- Introduction & Orthography
Arcanum Paterfamilias & Estvarya -- Ishvaran Glossary: Introduction and Orthography
Authors: mfelizandy & fractured_chaos
Graphics: fractured_chaos
Rating: For the Glossary, Everyone -- For the Story, Teen
Category: Written for the 2010 FMA Big Bang Challenge.
Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist (Hagane no Renkinjutsushi) was created by Arakawa Hiromu and is serialized monthly in Shonen Gangan (Square Enix). Both 'Fullmetal Alchemist' and 'Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood' are produced by Funimation. Copyright for this property is held by Arakawa Hiromu, Square Enix and Funimation. All Rights Reserved
Special Thanks: To evil_little_dog and alchemyotaku75 for the beta, and dzioo for the awesome artwork!
NOTE: This is an on-going project and is being used as reference for two stories. Thus, this glossary will remain in flux. Some words have vague definitions and need more, some of them need conjugations. Please keep checking back as these pages will be updated frequently. Thank you!
A/N:
fractured_chaos: All the credit (or blame) for this glossary goes to mfelizandy (who had way too much fun creating a partial language for the Ishvarun). Words (not just writing them, but creating them)--
mfelizandy: ("Hey, look what happens when you put Welsh and Albanian in the blender and push "mince!")
fractured_chaos: --is a hobby of hers, and her efforts have added more dimension to the Ishvarun culture.
mfelizandy: (Coming soon--VERBS!)
fractured_chaos: Please check back at the end of each chapter, because I'm sure that she'll add more to this (whether we use it all in the story is up for debate, however).
mfelizandy: I am going to get around (one of these years) to making up the written character sets/fonts for Ishvaran.
fractured_chaos: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Pronunciation note: Ishvaran, in both the common and the formal temple dialect, uses a consonant set that doesn't match up to western languages. Mishearings and deliberate mispronunciations in the hearing of unbelievers have led to the confusion over whether or not the deity, people, and country are called "Ishballa/Ishbalans/Ishbal" or "Ishvarra/Ishvarun/Ishvar". There are other words that get mangled to near-incomprehensibility by the trouble over consonants.
For the purposes of the story, however, when the scene is from a native POV, the pronunciation will be Ishvarra/Ishvarun/Ishvar, if the scene comes from an Amestrian POV the pronunciation will be Ishballa/Ishbalans/Ishbal.
Also, to avoid more confusion:
Ishvaran = language (either the temple tongue or the common tongue)
Ishvarun = the people (both singular and plural).
Ishvaran: There are two distinct Ishvarun languages.
The "Temple Tongue", is the formal and (some say) more elegant language. It is the language of scholars, Elders and Priests, and is most often used in ceremony, diplomacy, and the discussion of religious texts. All Ishvarun children are required to learn it, but most adults use only a few formal phrases of it regularly, and thus fall out of practice in using the complex grammatical system. The temple tongue has remained virtually unchanged for several thousand years, as evidenced by demonstrably ancient manuscripts, and is considered the most difficult language for non-Ishvarun to master.
The "Common Tongue" has several dialects, which can be separated into two categories, Southern -- which is littered with Aerugan and Cretan words that have been adapted to the Ishvarun ear and tongue -- and Northern -- which has evolved with a clear Amestrian and (more recently) Drachmani influence. The common tongue shifts over time. Currently, there is a trend toward the merging of dialects, as more and more Ishvarun make their home in the resettled city of Xerxes. Words are borrowed and adapted, and certain grammatical patterns change under the influence of the many foreigners who visit or live in Xerxes. Predictably, there are some Ishvarun who deplore the "decay" of their language, others who wholeheartedly embrace using the twenty-eight-character alphabet of their western neighbors rather than the sixty-three characters of the common tongue (known to scholars as the Ishvaran Miniscule Hand, to distinguish it from the eighty-four-character Ishvaran Brush Manuscript), and a majority who fall in between.
There are currently several competing designs for typing both the common and temple tongues -- typewriters are the primary argument used by those advocating a switch to western character sets for the common tongue. (No Ishvarun in his right mind would try to argue that the temple tongue should be written in anything but the ancestral character set.) Copying manuscripts by hand is something of a reverent activity in Ishvarun culture -- the printer's trade is less weighted with sacred history. Still, in the years since the restoration of Ishvarun independence, and with the rise of Xerxes as a gateway city, traders have again discovered that Ishvarun scholars are astonishingly indiscriminate in their craving for old books -- they will copy, translate, annotate, cross-index, and write detailed analyses of just about any non-fiction title they can get their hands on. This weak spot has been used by more than one trader to get surprisingly good deals on livestock and Ishvarun leatherwork.
Grammatical notes: Ishvaran sentences are usually arranged subject-object-verb in the common tongue. Certain commonly-used verbs displace the subject at the beginning of the sentence in accordance with the more ancient form. In the temple tongue word order depends on the tense being used.
The common dialect has no verb corresponding to “to be”--the temple tongue verb has fallen out of use, and so all forms of “is/was/were” are implied by context in casual speech. There are also no articles in the common tongue, though there are quite a few in the temple tongue.
Prepositions: Ishvaran does not have separate prepositions -- it instead uses prefixes, suffixes, and occasionally infixes added to the objects of the sentence. Hence the Ishvarun speaking Amestrian tends to move prepositions around according to common-tongue patterns, when she remembers them at all.
Plurals are in flux in the common tongue. There are conventions for forming plurals and marking specific numbers as well as more general terms used to mark "many", "hundreds", and "uncountable". However, these conventions are almost never used in daily conversation. Usage has drifted over time, and settled on one form or another to serve as both singular and plural. Hence yevarshedaht can mean one warrior-priest or hundreds of them, though grammatically and historically it's singular, and kishwai is the plural form for "two sisters", but is used to mean one sister or a dozen sisters in common parlance. The temple tongue and various archaic versions of the common tongue preserved in the folk songs of Ishvar offer clues to the progression from the complicated plurals of Old Ishvaran to the near-nonexistence of them in modern times.
Maxims: To the outsider, it seems as though Ishvarun have a saying or a story for everything. It has been known to annoy, or at the very least, puzzle non-Ishvarun when speaking to a native who seems to respond to everything with a maxim. The Ishvarun themselves know how irritating the constant use of obscure idioms and maxims can be, and they sometimes take advantage of this irritation in their dealings with foreigners, whether commercial or political. Visitors to Ishvarun communities are advised that the best answer to this tactic is to ask to hear the story that explains the idiom. Ishvarun law commands that someone who asks with sincere interest be taught. The inconvenience of stopping the negotiations to tell a story will soon pall.
Some of the more 'popular', or well-known maxims:
“That which appears on the plate tastes not as sweet as that which one hunted and caught.”
“The wiser the soul, the deeper the water.” -- This refers to the Ishvarun concept of sazamuz -- the wiser the person, the more layers of meaning his or her actions are likely to have.
"Where there are no lions, there will be wolves." -- A statement usually offered in rueful humor, this statement refers to the realist attitude that wherever one goes, there will be some form of danger or unpleasantness -- the point is how one person or a community handles the difficulties.
“The louder men shout, the more softly God whispers.” -- This is a sazamuz maxim. It’s most commonly used by Elders instructing arguing members of the community to withdraw and to act and pray quietly until “the voice of God” is clear and audible to them. It’s also an expression of disapproval of decisions made according to whoever shouts the loudest. Ishvarun community meetings are often lively, to say the least, but the expectation is that when the decisions are made, they are based in fact and “the words of God”. Furthermore, this phrase also refers to the belief that a person who is boastful or overbearing is too busy talking and being spiritually “noisy” to hear and pay attention to the dictates of the Ishvarun deity.
"The husband looks far to the horizon, the wife looks deep into the river." -- This is one of the common expressions of the Ishvarun attitudes regarding marriage and life in general -- namely that men and women thrive better when each does the tasks he or she is best suited for. Therefore while it isn't unheard of for a man to be a weaver or a woman to be a carver, the household will be considered out of balance unless the mate of the male weaver takes up some job usually attended to by men, such as household carpentry or caring for the family's fruit trees.
Rhaff otsotoj tschafarixi: (Rahf aht-zo-tozh tsh-ah-fah-ricksee). Transliteration: Rope lion’s neck around.
Translation: “The rope is around the lion’s neck.”
This idiom is used to indicate that one is too far into a task to back out now. Note the clipping of both otsoa “lion” and -jetoj, the possessive marker.
Authors: mfelizandy & fractured_chaos
Graphics: fractured_chaos
Rating: For the Glossary, Everyone -- For the Story, Teen
Category: Written for the 2010 FMA Big Bang Challenge.
Disclaimer: Fullmetal Alchemist (Hagane no Renkinjutsushi) was created by Arakawa Hiromu and is serialized monthly in Shonen Gangan (Square Enix). Both 'Fullmetal Alchemist' and 'Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood' are produced by Funimation. Copyright for this property is held by Arakawa Hiromu, Square Enix and Funimation. All Rights Reserved
Special Thanks: To evil_little_dog and alchemyotaku75 for the beta, and dzioo for the awesome artwork!
NOTE: This is an on-going project and is being used as reference for two stories. Thus, this glossary will remain in flux. Some words have vague definitions and need more, some of them need conjugations. Please keep checking back as these pages will be updated frequently. Thank you!
A/N:
fractured_chaos: All the credit (or blame) for this glossary goes to mfelizandy (who had way too much fun creating a partial language for the Ishvarun). Words (not just writing them, but creating them)--
mfelizandy: ("Hey, look what happens when you put Welsh and Albanian in the blender and push "mince!")
fractured_chaos: --is a hobby of hers, and her efforts have added more dimension to the Ishvarun culture.
mfelizandy: (Coming soon--VERBS!)
fractured_chaos: Please check back at the end of each chapter, because I'm sure that she'll add more to this (whether we use it all in the story is up for debate, however).
mfelizandy: I am going to get around (one of these years) to making up the written character sets/fonts for Ishvaran.
fractured_chaos: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Pronunciation note: Ishvaran, in both the common and the formal temple dialect, uses a consonant set that doesn't match up to western languages. Mishearings and deliberate mispronunciations in the hearing of unbelievers have led to the confusion over whether or not the deity, people, and country are called "Ishballa/Ishbalans/Ishbal" or "Ishvarra/Ishvarun/Ishvar". There are other words that get mangled to near-incomprehensibility by the trouble over consonants.
For the purposes of the story, however, when the scene is from a native POV, the pronunciation will be Ishvarra/Ishvarun/Ishvar, if the scene comes from an Amestrian POV the pronunciation will be Ishballa/Ishbalans/Ishbal.
Also, to avoid more confusion:
Ishvaran = language (either the temple tongue or the common tongue)
Ishvarun = the people (both singular and plural).
Ishvaran: There are two distinct Ishvarun languages.
The "Temple Tongue", is the formal and (some say) more elegant language. It is the language of scholars, Elders and Priests, and is most often used in ceremony, diplomacy, and the discussion of religious texts. All Ishvarun children are required to learn it, but most adults use only a few formal phrases of it regularly, and thus fall out of practice in using the complex grammatical system. The temple tongue has remained virtually unchanged for several thousand years, as evidenced by demonstrably ancient manuscripts, and is considered the most difficult language for non-Ishvarun to master.
The "Common Tongue" has several dialects, which can be separated into two categories, Southern -- which is littered with Aerugan and Cretan words that have been adapted to the Ishvarun ear and tongue -- and Northern -- which has evolved with a clear Amestrian and (more recently) Drachmani influence. The common tongue shifts over time. Currently, there is a trend toward the merging of dialects, as more and more Ishvarun make their home in the resettled city of Xerxes. Words are borrowed and adapted, and certain grammatical patterns change under the influence of the many foreigners who visit or live in Xerxes. Predictably, there are some Ishvarun who deplore the "decay" of their language, others who wholeheartedly embrace using the twenty-eight-character alphabet of their western neighbors rather than the sixty-three characters of the common tongue (known to scholars as the Ishvaran Miniscule Hand, to distinguish it from the eighty-four-character Ishvaran Brush Manuscript), and a majority who fall in between.
There are currently several competing designs for typing both the common and temple tongues -- typewriters are the primary argument used by those advocating a switch to western character sets for the common tongue. (No Ishvarun in his right mind would try to argue that the temple tongue should be written in anything but the ancestral character set.) Copying manuscripts by hand is something of a reverent activity in Ishvarun culture -- the printer's trade is less weighted with sacred history. Still, in the years since the restoration of Ishvarun independence, and with the rise of Xerxes as a gateway city, traders have again discovered that Ishvarun scholars are astonishingly indiscriminate in their craving for old books -- they will copy, translate, annotate, cross-index, and write detailed analyses of just about any non-fiction title they can get their hands on. This weak spot has been used by more than one trader to get surprisingly good deals on livestock and Ishvarun leatherwork.
Grammatical notes: Ishvaran sentences are usually arranged subject-object-verb in the common tongue. Certain commonly-used verbs displace the subject at the beginning of the sentence in accordance with the more ancient form. In the temple tongue word order depends on the tense being used.
The common dialect has no verb corresponding to “to be”--the temple tongue verb has fallen out of use, and so all forms of “is/was/were” are implied by context in casual speech. There are also no articles in the common tongue, though there are quite a few in the temple tongue.
Prepositions: Ishvaran does not have separate prepositions -- it instead uses prefixes, suffixes, and occasionally infixes added to the objects of the sentence. Hence the Ishvarun speaking Amestrian tends to move prepositions around according to common-tongue patterns, when she remembers them at all.
Plurals are in flux in the common tongue. There are conventions for forming plurals and marking specific numbers as well as more general terms used to mark "many", "hundreds", and "uncountable". However, these conventions are almost never used in daily conversation. Usage has drifted over time, and settled on one form or another to serve as both singular and plural. Hence yevarshedaht can mean one warrior-priest or hundreds of them, though grammatically and historically it's singular, and kishwai is the plural form for "two sisters", but is used to mean one sister or a dozen sisters in common parlance. The temple tongue and various archaic versions of the common tongue preserved in the folk songs of Ishvar offer clues to the progression from the complicated plurals of Old Ishvaran to the near-nonexistence of them in modern times.
Maxims: To the outsider, it seems as though Ishvarun have a saying or a story for everything. It has been known to annoy, or at the very least, puzzle non-Ishvarun when speaking to a native who seems to respond to everything with a maxim. The Ishvarun themselves know how irritating the constant use of obscure idioms and maxims can be, and they sometimes take advantage of this irritation in their dealings with foreigners, whether commercial or political. Visitors to Ishvarun communities are advised that the best answer to this tactic is to ask to hear the story that explains the idiom. Ishvarun law commands that someone who asks with sincere interest be taught. The inconvenience of stopping the negotiations to tell a story will soon pall.
Some of the more 'popular', or well-known maxims:
“That which appears on the plate tastes not as sweet as that which one hunted and caught.”
“The wiser the soul, the deeper the water.” -- This refers to the Ishvarun concept of sazamuz -- the wiser the person, the more layers of meaning his or her actions are likely to have.
"Where there are no lions, there will be wolves." -- A statement usually offered in rueful humor, this statement refers to the realist attitude that wherever one goes, there will be some form of danger or unpleasantness -- the point is how one person or a community handles the difficulties.
“The louder men shout, the more softly God whispers.” -- This is a sazamuz maxim. It’s most commonly used by Elders instructing arguing members of the community to withdraw and to act and pray quietly until “the voice of God” is clear and audible to them. It’s also an expression of disapproval of decisions made according to whoever shouts the loudest. Ishvarun community meetings are often lively, to say the least, but the expectation is that when the decisions are made, they are based in fact and “the words of God”. Furthermore, this phrase also refers to the belief that a person who is boastful or overbearing is too busy talking and being spiritually “noisy” to hear and pay attention to the dictates of the Ishvarun deity.
"The husband looks far to the horizon, the wife looks deep into the river." -- This is one of the common expressions of the Ishvarun attitudes regarding marriage and life in general -- namely that men and women thrive better when each does the tasks he or she is best suited for. Therefore while it isn't unheard of for a man to be a weaver or a woman to be a carver, the household will be considered out of balance unless the mate of the male weaver takes up some job usually attended to by men, such as household carpentry or caring for the family's fruit trees.
Rhaff otsotoj tschafarixi: (Rahf aht-zo-tozh tsh-ah-fah-ricksee). Transliteration: Rope lion’s neck around.
Translation: “The rope is around the lion’s neck.”
This idiom is used to indicate that one is too far into a task to back out now. Note the clipping of both otsoa “lion” and -jetoj, the possessive marker.