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Post by mossecho on Dec 18, 2020 6:09:56 GMT -5
Okay y'all, here is my thought dump for the vampires' language. I'm just putting it in a spoiler category because I imagine I'll have a lot of stuff to stay and... yeah. Be aware that everything is very rough, so I'll probably change this. Also I'll reference a bunch of linguistics stuff that I honestly don't understand very well, so my exact terminology may be off. So... yeah. idk, here it is, I guess?
from what little I know about making conlangs, people generally start off following structures similar to their native language(s), then learn about other languages' features and go crazy by incorporating way too much, and then mellow out. I'm in the go crazy stage rn (although probably following Indo-European features more than I think). I am taking a lot from Spanish and Russian, but there are a lot of linguistic features that I heard about and thought "oh that's cool!" so... expect craziness, I suppose. also, I'm calling this language Vampiric for the time being. We can come up with a proper name later on, but this is just so I don't have to say "this language" or "the vampires' language" over and over. - Word order is SVO (subject, verb, object). The rest of this language will get a bit crazy, so this makes other stuff easier to follow. To start the crazies, it should be noted that because this is a language with cases, this word order is not fixed. SOV, OSV, VOS, etc. can all be grammatically correct, but they are not the default word order.
Vampiric connects formality to word order (please see the formality section), so this means that verbs and such will get changed around to observe this order. So if you are talking about Alex talking to his brother, an English speaker would just say "Alex spoke to his brother." However, this would become "The brother of him was spoken to by Alex." The brother is treated with more respect due to his age, so he is fronted as the sentence's subject and the verb is changed to passive to accomodate this. Alex goes last because he is ranked below his brother. Vampiric also would not say "his" before "brother" in this context, since that still places Alex before his brother, even if it is only technically. As such, "his brother" becomes "the brother of him" to put the brother first, and then the "of him" is applied to Alex contextually.
Also, adjectives come after nouns (as they do in Spanish). The adjective order is the same as it is in English.
- I really don't have much about the language's phonology, but it follows Spanish's sound system pretty closely (for now, at least). I'm adding a vowel (schwa, /ə/, it's my favorite) and maybe in the future there will be a few more consonants, but most of the phonology will be based on Spanish.
- Vampiric has two main forms: Vulgar and High Vampiric. They are generally similar, but there are differences between the two that I will point out as I go. High Vampiric is used in formal settings (I know the vampires are basically always formal, whatever). "Formal settings" refers to basically everything related to the government. You'll hear High Vampiric in local town-council-esque meetings, in Clan meetings, in diplomatic conversations between Clan leaders, in the Capital, etc. Vulgar Vampiric is for basically everything else. Using the wrong form is considered extremely rude.
- High and Vulgar Vampiric are lingua francas. Back when vampires did not have a single nation, but instead had various ethnic groups and little city-states (which later evolved into covens), they all spoke different languages. Over time, these languages diverged into younger, newer languages and become language families. Overtime, different language families became more or less commonly used. High Vampiric is an artificially constructed language based on the most powerful language family, the one spoken by the most powerful coven pre-Cataclysm. Unfortunately, that language family's speakers were all killed during the Cataclysm, so no one speaks it anymore. Anyhow, different language families are often completely mutually unintelligible, save the very occasional loanwords. As a result, something needed to become the informal lingua franca, since vampires care a lot about formality and you can't sell all high and mighty when buying stuff at market. So Vulgar Vampiric came along. It was the language spoken at the Capitol post-Cataclysm, so it became the informal lingua franca among all vampires. Of course, speakers from different regions will have distinct accents and may speak the same language differently (see: Alex and the yee-haw vampires), but it's like Scottish and American English speakers interacting, not American English and Mandarin Chinese speakers.
- There are various regional and coven-specific languages. Yes, more and more languages. Vampiric (both High and Vulgar) are spoken across the nation, but there are regional lingua francas and languages that are only spoken within specific covens. Now, the languages spoken in different covens in the same region are normally intelligible, but they are still distinct languages (like how Italian and Spanish speakers can understand each other decently well, although they still speak different languages). These languages are considered low and highly informal, so they are only spoken within the community. That said, some regions' and covens' languages are more highly regarded (like how I mentioned "the language spoken at the Capitol post-Cataclysm" led to modern Vulgar Vampiric; that was because it was the highest-regarded regional language). All in all, the average vampire speaks three or four languages. Some speak even more (namely traders and regional- or national-level politicians, basically anyone who needs to travel), but three to four is the norm.
- High Vampiric is a mostly agglutinative language. This means that it has specific morphemes with specific meanings, but each morpheme has only one corresponding meaning. For example, it will have morphemes for each case (see below for the cases) and number, but it does not have any morphemes that encode both case and number information. Languages that use morphemes that encode multiple meanings are called fusional or inflected languages. Spanish is an inflected language. In Spanish, the word "comían" basically means "they ate (continuously or for an extended period of time)." The root, "com-" indicates that the action is eating, while "-ían" communicates that this event was done by multiple people. It is also specific to the imperfect tense, so the action becomes something that happened continuously instead of just starting and ending. (That's an awful explanation, I'm sorry.) But you get the idea: one morpheme (-ían), lots of meaning. This is not how High Vampiric works. Instead, each morpheme has only one meaning. Now there are some exceptions (see tones and conjugation), but generally this is how it works. So instead of "comían" breaking into "com-ían," it could break into "com-í--an", where "com-" was the root for "to eat," "-í-" indicated the imperfect tense, and "-an" indicated third person plural. Think of it like morpheme... slots, I guess. I haven't thought a lot about the order of morphemes, but I'm thinking it will go something like this: [honorific]-[root]-[negation]-[number indication]-[grammatical case]-[location case]-[formality indication]-[secondary honorific]. This is not comprehensive. A lot of these morpheme slots can be excluded or included depending on context. So this is how nouns work, basically. I haven't thought about adjectives yet. Also, the big thing that is not agglutinative is verbs. They are fusional. This is because I want to preserve a major grammatical similarity to Spanish so... here we are. Verbs are fusional, everything else is agglutinative.
- Vulgar Vampiric is... not very agglutinative. High Vampiric has been very highly regulated and preserved (basically everyone is like "we need to speak properly, we can't change anything, no slang is allowed, grrr kids these days will ruin the language"), but Vulgar Vampiric was left to do whatever it wanted. As a result, it underwent a ton of sound changes. So originally, Vulgar Vampric had a lot of different affixes, just like High Vampiric. It was very agglutinative. But as more and more sound changes came into the mix, these affixes became so different from their original forms that they meshed into each other, formed entirely unique endings, and suddenly you have a highly inflected language. More than that, these inflections rarely show any resemblance to each other. Different verbs can have entirely different forms of conjugation, purely because the verb stems had different sounds before the sound changes occur.
- Basic tenses: Far past, recent past, present, future. I don't know of any languages that distinguish between the far and recent past, but I like the idea. It goes well with vampires. Also, the difference between "far past" and "recent past" are relative. So something might be recent past for one vampire but far past for another. There are some intricacies with tense (explained below, under evidentiality), but these are the basic tenses.
The present tense is probably the most complicated, since it can also be used for the recent past and future. It's more like "the time around this moment" as opposed to "right now." For example, let's say you are reading a book, and then a friend interrupts to ask what you are doing. You put the book down and say "I am reading." Well, you're not actually reading in that exact moment, right? But you are reading in that close time period. As such, the present tense isn't "this precise moment." This is how Vampiric views the present tense. It's what's happening around now.
Tense is indicated via verb conjugation, although there are also independent tense markers (and there is a set of conjugations that are entirely tenseless). The auxiliary tense marker is optional.
- Aspect. Vampiric, as well as most vampire languages, goes crazy with aspect. I haven't actually decided anything yet, but... it will get nuts. mwahaha. I'm not planning on going as crazy as Navajo, but expect some weird stuff.
- Cases. Vampiric has a lot of cases. Many of these are locative, but there are also some grammatical cases. Locative cases basically do what a preposition would do (it's like saying "I walk a house-into" instead of "I walk into a house"). I haven't come up with a comprehensive list, but I'm thinking they would have a case for each Spanish preposition (I'm just going off of Spanish since so many of their names are from Spanish). So they would have a unique case for prepositions like "a," "en," "hacia," "sobre," etc. ("to/at," "in/on/at," "until/toward," "about/on/upon/above/over/around") (thanks SpanishDict for the translations). They also have some grammatical cases: nominative, accusative, ergative, absolutive, genitive, dative, and instrumental (see below, ergativity-absolutivity vs nominativity-accusativity). Genitive marks when someone possesses something (i.e. "the book of John" becomes "the book John-[genitive marker]"). Dative indicates the indirect object (i.e. "John gives the book to Jane" becomes "John gives the book Jane-[dative marker]). Instrumental case shows when something was used to complete an action (i.e. "John wrote the book with a pencil" becomes "John wrote the book pencil-[instrumentive marker]). To clarify, those examples ignored other grammatical inflections and declensions and the like, only focusing on the specific case being demonstrated. As you can see, case markers are always placed at the end of a word. The grammatical cases that I gave examples for (genitive, dative, instrumental) are based on Russian cases. In Russian, they also have some extra meanings (for example, the genitive case is also used for negation). I might incorporate these later, but for now let's go with the simpler examples. The nominative, accusative, ergative, and absolutive cases are discussed below, under ergativity-absolutivity vs nominativity-accusativity.
- Noun classes (aka grammatical gender). Vampiric has three noun classes: vampire, animal, and other. On their face, these noun classes are pretty straightfoward. Vampires is used for vampires, animal describes animals and other species, and other describes everything else. Technically inanimate is not a super accurate name, since that noun class is also used for living things like plants, but those are culturally considered to be in the same category as mountains, clouds, elevators, that sort of thing.
Now, vampires call these noun classes "vampire," "foreign," and "inanimate." This is not super great naming, since "foreign" is highkey xenophobic towards other people and also pretty iffy once you consider the fact that foreign lumps people and animals together. Reality is that the "foreign" noun class pretty much describes anything that vampires can eat (so anything with blood), but vampires are too prim and proper to acknowledge that as the true meaning behind this noun classification. As a result, the "animal" class does not include things that are clearly animals but do not have enough blood to be worth eating, like insects. "Inanimate" lumps together everything else. There is also an emerging distinction between natural objects and manmade ones. As such, the inanimate class is starting to split into two classes: "natural" and "manmade". This distinction is not yet official, but it is very relevant in Vulgar Vampiric. Still, since technology is rarely discussed within governmental spheres, the distinction is slower to enter into High Vampiric.
- Formality. It's a big deal. Vampires are very class-conscious, and this really shows up in their language. They have many different levels of formality, and they are all built into the language. I'll elaborate more later.
For now, let's focus on one important aspect of formality: length. The more time you spend saying something, the more important and respected it is. As such, short pronouns tend to be informal ones, and long ones are very polite. There are a lot more noun endings that are glommed onto important vampires than werewolves.
Furthermore, formality affects word order. The start of a sentence is for the most important subjects, and then the least important ones go at the end. See the word order section for an example of this.
- Ergativity-absolutivity vs nominativity-accusativity. This is the main distinction between Vulgar and High Vampiric. It is easily the most complicated, hard-to-understand (for me, at least) thing on this list. Allow me to oversimplify something that I really don't understand that well (by basically rephrasing what I read on Wikipedia and Quora, heheh, great sources). To start, intransitive verbs don't have direct objects, but transitive verbs do. So let's say I have three different nouns: subjects of intransitive verbs (S), agents of transitive verbs (A), and objects of transitive verbs (O). Here are two examples: 1. I (S) jump. 2. Jack (A) draws Rose (O). The first sentence has an intransitive verb, the second sentence has a transitive verb. In a nominative-accusative, like English and most Indo-European languages, S and A have the same case (nominative) while O is in the accusative case. In some other languages (like Basque), S and O are in the same case (absolutive) and A is in the ergative case. Somehow through some weird happening in Vampiric's evolution that would probably never actually happen, Vulgar and High Vampiric split across these distinctions. High Vampiric follows the ergative-absolutive model (so it has the ergative and absolutive cases) while Vulgar Vampiric follows the nominative-accusative model (so it has the nominative and accusative case). This is generally a simplified version. Please see below.
- Fluid-S system. No language is entirely, 100% ergative-absolutive or nominative-accusative. High Vampiric follows the fluid-s system (it is a subset of the split-s system, which I will explain), so they treat the subject differently. A split-s system treats the subject of a sentence (S) differently depending on volition. As a reminder, ergative-absolutive systems group the subject (S) and the object (O) together, whereas the subject (S) and the agent (A) are grouped together in nominative-accusative languages. In the split-s system, the subject (S) can switch from being grouped with an object (O) to being grouped with the agent (A). In other words, the system switches from ergative-absolutive to nominative-accusative. This happens with intransitive verbs when the speaker has no volition. For example, let's look at the verbs "to slip" and "to slide." When someone slips, they generally did not intend on slipping. They had no volition, they just... did it. On the other hand, "to slide" implies that the person meant to slide. They had volition. So if we have the sentences "John (S) slips" and "John (S) slides," a non-split-s system would say these as "John (S-O) slips" and "John (S-O) slides" (here, the notation (S-O) shows that (S) and (O) are grouped together, whereas (S-A) groups (S) and (A)). But in a split-s system, these sentences would be "John (S-O) slips" and "John (S-A) slides" to reflect non-volition and volition, respectively. This means that you could eliminate one of these verbs from a language, because they describe the same action but differ in volition. Since we have another way of indicating volition, we do not need to have these two verbs. The fluid-s system takes this a bit further. Instead of only eliminating a verb if there is another verb that performs the same action, the fluid-s system can also add volition to verbs that otherwise don't have it. (Obviously there is no master list of verbs that languages pick and choose from, and this is an English-biased explanation, but it makes it easier for me to explain this and I hope you don't mind) Let's take the verb "to cry." Now, someone can cry without meaning to, but they can also purposefully cry (i.e. "fake-cry"). We don't have a built-in volition distinction here in English (well, we kind of do with "fake-cry," but whatever). However, a fluid-s system could distinguish these two. If we say "John (S-O) cries," then he did not do so deliberately. So if John's wife just told him that she didn't love him, we would say that "John (S-O) cries," because it is an involuntary reaction. But if John is an actor and is crying because it is part of a scene, then it becomes "John (S-A) cries." In High Vampiric, the fluid-s system differentiates volition because (S-O) is the "standard" alignment (again, High-Vampiric is ergative-absolutive.
This fluid-s system also appears in Vulgar Vampiric, although it indicates sympathy more than volition. Because (S-A) is the default grouping here, (S-O) is a purposeful choice to portray the subject as the unfortunate sufferer of an action. To demonstrate this, let's return to the construction "John (S-O) cries." In High Vampiric, this shows that John did not purposefully cry. In Vulgar Vampiric, it also shows that he had no volition, but it portrays this sympathetically. Vulgar Vampiric could construct "John cries" as "John (S-A) cries" or "John (S-O) cries" in this case, regardless of his volition. The (S-O) construction emphasizes his lack of volition, thus demonstrating the speaker's sympathy/empathy for John. In other words, Vulgar Vampiric uses the fluid-s system to express sympathy. The (S-O) construction implies a lack of volition, but it does so in a sympathetic context. If the speaker does not want to demonstrate their sympathy for John's involuntary action, then they would use the (S-A) construction. Complicated? Yes. Unnecessary and over the top? Yeah. Am I still incorporating this? Yep! (also, please note that I based this system on what little I understand from watching a YouTube video and reading a Wikipedia page, so the linguistics of this is iffy) (not to say it is wrong by default, but it is just probably not 100% right)
- Evidentiality. This is when languages incorporate how the speaker knows that something happened. For Vampiric, evidentiality reflects "the nature of the evidence supporting a statement" (quoting Wikipedia's description of "type II" evidentiality). This means there are markers for personally witnessed, reportative (both heresay and quotative), assumed, and inferred information. Personally witnessed information is broken into two subcategories: olfactory and nonolfactory. So if a vampire smelled something, they will use one marker. If the information was not acquired via their smell (i.e. they saw it happen or heard a conversation), they will use a different marker. Additionally, evidentiality can be applied to the past tense. If the speaker uses the personally witnessed marker with the tense marker (by convention they use the nonolfactory marker, although it is grammatically correct to use the olfactory one), they are indicating that the event happened during their life time. So when used with a verb, the personal witness marker indicates how the information was acquired. When used with a tense marker, it indicates if the event happened during their lifetime. Only very old vampires (i.e. those with mostly- or all-gray hair) can use the far past and the personal marker together, but this is a social convention and not a grammatical rule. In Vulgar Vampiric, evidentiality is optional. However, its usage is mandatory in High Vampiric.
- Smell is very important in Vampiric. If any of you know about the conlang Aramteskan (made by Lauren Gawne in collaboration with P.M. Freestone, highly recommend Googling it), Vampiric's relationship with smell is based on this language. It is not *as* extreme as Aramteskan, but it heads in that direction. Because vampires' primary sense is smell, their language uses smell as opposed to sight a lot. They have a lot of words for different smells and types of smells (so they have a word for the smell of something repulsive, another for a pleasant sweet smell, another for the smell of something that is way too sweet to be pleasant, tons of word for different smells of blood, etc.). A lot of their sayings relate to smell too. To steal something from Aramteskan, vampires don't "face forward" but are "nose forward." They also do not distinguish between "smell" and "taste" (they know the difference, obviously, but they do not have a difference for these experiences in their language). They also have more verbs relating to smell (i.e. to smell something in general (so it's not purposeful, like if you walked into a room and just smelled something in the air without meaning to smell something), to purposefully smell something, to seek something by smelling, to smell something for a long time, etc).
- Generally lots of sense-related words. Because vampires have some of, if not the, most developed senses, they experience everything very vividly and have a ton of words for each sense. There are still more smell-related words than words associated with anything else, but you still get the idea. Their next best sense is hearing, so they have a lot of words for various sounds. I think the easiest way to think about these added sense words is in terms of colors (and vampires have a ton of color terms). In English, we make a distinction between red and light red (aka pink). In Russian, there is a distinction between light and dark blue. Now, it's not like English speakers cannot see this distinction (is a summer sky the same color as lapis lazuli?), we just don't make it linguistically. Vampiric is like this with other languages just... to the extreme. Lots of color terms. Part of it is because they have better vision so they can actually see more colors than some other species (like the difference between tetrachromats and the rest of us), most of it is because they just... like categorizing things. So yay, more color words, more sound words. There is one big exception though: taste-related words. Vampires really don't have any unique taste words. They describe the taste of blood, the only thing they really consume, by using their taste vocabulary. So while everyone else can describe things as "sweet" or "umame" or whatever, vampires don't have any of those words.
- Vowel harmony. I would like this language to have vowel harmony, but I kinda screwed myself by naming the first vampire character "Alexander Rojas Lopez." Vowel harmony is where vowels match each other within a word, so you can see why "Alexander Rojas Lopez" kinda ruins this from the get-go. So far, my best idea is that High Vampiric sorts vowels according to if they are close vowels (/i/ or /u/ in Spanish phonology) or mid or open (so /e/, /o/, and /a/ in Spanish phonology and /ə/). This allows me to keep Alex's name the way it is, whew. Vowel harmony should be consistent across the words and are mainly used to keep cases aligned to the root word. So if the genitive case marker was "-l[vowel]" (idk if it is yet, this is just an example), "book of Alexander" would be "book of Alexander-le" or "Alexander-la" (I'm just going to say it would normally follow the first vowel to simplify things, but the "-la" could be a stylistic or dialectic difference). However, "book of Liluh" (the Vampiric pronunciation of "Lilah") would become "book Liluh-li). Just for translation purposes, High Vampiric converts foreign words with a mix of these two vowel types by making all the vowels align with the first one. They pair certain vowels with others (/i/ ↔ /e/, /u/ ↔ /o/, /a/, /ə/) (in other words, the front vowels are put together and the central and back vowels are put together). So "Lilah" becomes "Liluh" because /u/ and /a/ are together. The name "Valentina" would become "Valintina," since the first vowel, /a/, is a mid/open vowel and /e/ is paired with /i/. Vulgar Vampiric works almost the exact same way, but it separates /ə/ from all the other vowels. /ə/ can be appear in words with close vowels (/i/, /u/) and in words with mid and open vowels (/e/, /o/, /a/). It is never converted. Let's look at the name "Crispen" to show this. (As a side note, while the letter is "e," the vowel is /ə/, from my understanding, so I'll be writing "Crispen" as "Crispən" for the rest of this example.) In High Vampiric, "Crispən" would become "Crispun." In Vulgar Vampiric, "Crispən" would stay "Crispən."
- Pronouns! I'm working this out as I go along, but here we go. Right now, I'm thinking that Vampiric distinguishes pronouns based on person, number, clusivity (when applicable), animacy, and species. Of course, there are also different pronouns for different cases. And for different formality levels (that's where this all gets really complicated so... not going into that yet, not even touching it with a stick). There are also possessive pronouns. These are just the basic pronouns that get changed around. Here is table: (to clarify, v=vampire, f=foreign, in.=inanimate)
| singular | plural | 1st person (v) | I | we (inclusive) |
|
| we (exclusive) | 2nd person (v) | you | you | 2nd person (f) | you | you | 3rd person (v) | they | they | 3rd person (f) | they | they | 3rd person (in.) | it | they |
This is basically a Vampiric-to-English translation of each pronoun. As you can see, plural pronouns are more complex than their singular counterparts. I'll review how each distinguishing element appears. To start, you can see the person and number distinctions pretty clearly (1st, 2nd, 3rd person and singular and plural). Clusivity is when the 1st person plural ("we," in English) clarifies whether or not the listener is included. Let's say you have three people: John, Joe, and Jane. John is talking to Joe, and he says "we are going to the movies." "We" could mean John and Joe, John and Jane, or all three. If "we" includes Joe, the listener, then it is the inclusive we. If it does not, then it is the exclusive we. Animacy is also pretty easy to grasp. Basically, if something is alive, it is animate. If not, then it is inanimate.
With Vampiric pronouns, pretty much everything is animate, with the exception of that last third person pair of pronouns (the last row). Also, vampires sometimes use the inanimate pronouns to refer to other species, but this is very derogatory. They often do this for werewolves. In short, inanimacy only appears in the third person.
Now we get to the species difference. As you can see, each animate pronoun is split into two categories: vampire and foreign. Foreign normally means another species, although it could refer to another group of vampires if the cultural divide is large enough (i.e. Alex's coven vs the yee-haw vampires). This vampire-foreigner distinction does not appear in the first person because, well, it's never really needed. Vampires are very insular; they don't associate with other species. As a result, their language does not need to separate vampire from foreigner in the first person. Obviously this doesn't work for Alex right now, so he'll use the normally-vampires-only first person terms. So if he were talking to Lilah, he could use the "we (inclusive" to refer to the both of them. The more grammatically correct form would be "I and you (f)," but that implies that they aren't friends. So that's not happening. Also, remember that only vampires speak Vampiric, so there is no need for a first person pronoun that a person of another species would use. If someone who was not a vampire were to use the first person pronoun, that would just be wrong. They *have* to use the third person foreign pronoun. I suppose this is another example vampires' built-in linguistic xenophobia. Finally, while these are a lot of pronouns, the foreigner pronouns are not used much in Vampiric. Now, Alex is going to be using these pronouns a lot, but that does not reflect how most vampires use it. Vampire culture is very insular, so they rarely need to talk about foreigners. Furthermore, although covens have differences between their cultures, it is rare for them to use the foreigner pronouns to refer to each other. Vampires have a strong sense of species pride, so calling another coven foreign is very rude. It can still happen (again, yee-haw vampires), but it rarely does.
Side note: there can be extra formality inflections with pronouns (see formality, tones, whenever I write those), but these are the basics. Also, these pronouns should all include one vowel. For singular pronouns, this vowel will change according to the name of the person/object. For plural pronouns, this gets a bit more complicated. If the group has a name or is a plural of one object (i.e. "Shifters," "vampires," "mushrooms," "books"), then the vowel is the same as the name's first vowel (so "Shifters" → /i/, "vampires" → /a/, "mushrooms" → /u/, "books" → /o/) (obviously I didn't change these words so they follow Vampiric's vowel harmony, but you get it). If it is a group of individuals, it is really just up to the speaker to choose. Most speakers choose the pronoun of the next sentence they're saying (pronouns tend to be monosyllabic, so this makes the sentence sound better), but this is just convention and not an actual linguistic rule.
Vampiric allows for pronoun dropping (like how Spanish can say '¿tú tienes? or ¿tienes? and they both mean "do you have (it)?"). But again, there are different attitudes towards pronoun dropping in High and Low Vampiric. In High Vampiric, pronoun dropping has implications for formality. In Vulgar Vampiric, it's just the speaker's preference. It could have that implication, but that's more contextual than an inherent part of the language.
- There are a ton of diminutives. I've already posted about this, but I figured I should put that here too. Diminutives are essentially terms of affection (they can make something smaller, like "perro" (dog) to "perrito" (puppy) in Spanish, but this is not their primary use). Vampiric has a few of them, each with slightly different implications (one is for romantic partners, another is for younger family members, another for friends, etc). Unusually for Vampiric, they do not have specific formality markers. This is because, well, you probably already used a formality marker before using a diminutive. And more importantly diminutives are only used for people you are on a casual formality level with, so... it's not really an issue. At any rate, diminutives do not vary in terms of level of affection a lot, just the time of affection. So you use a different diminutive for your best friend than for your partner, but both express the same "level" or "degree" of affection. However, diminutives can be repeated over and over. The more something is repeated, the more emphasized it is. So, if we did this in English, you could think of "kid-do" as the first diminutive level. "Kid-do-do" would be more affectionate, and "kid-do-do-do-do-do-do" would be super affectionate.
- Vampiric has two basic number systems: base-10 and base-20. Base-10 is for High Vampiric, base-20 is for Vulgar Vampiric. High Vampiric follows the Spanish number system. This is pretty similar to the English number system (almost the exact same, really), although they branch off at 1,000,000,000. In English, we call this "one billion," but in Spanish it is "one thousand milion." 10,000,000,000 is "ten billion" (English) and "ten thousand million" (in Spanish). Likewise, 1,000,000,000,000 is "one billion" in Spanish and High Vampiric, not "one trillion" like it is in English. Other than that though, High Vampiric pretty much obeys English numerical system. So you don't have to get your head around anything, yay! (: Now, Vulgar Vampiric runs on a base-20 system. So you have 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j. You get the gist.
Okay, brief background: High Vampiric's numerical system is based on Spanish whereas the Vulgar Vampiric's base-20 system echoes Nahuatl's numerical system. I know that Spanish is seen as more "prestigious" than Nahuatl and I would just like to say that that is stupid. They are both beautiful languages and both Spanish and Nahuatl deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.
Anyways, as for why Vampiric has two number systems, it's pretty simple: they evolved separately. Way back before the Cataclysm or whatever, before vampires united as one species and they were all hanging out in different little covens, some of them adopted different number systems. Some covens went with base-10 because, well, they had ten fingers. Others went with base-20 because they have ten fingers and ten toes. One went with base-20 but switches to counting other people's digits when they get above 20. So 20 is badly translated as "my 20th digit," 24 is "the second person's fourth digit," 96 is "the fifth person's sixteenth digit." that system is mostly gone, but you can still find it in very remote covens (me thinks the yee-haw vampires would use this) During the dictatorship, a lot of stuff changed, including the number system. Think of it like French Revolution calendar that had ten-day weeks instead of seven-day ones. For vampires, their entire number system changed to base-5. This was based on two things: hands and senses. Base-5 does reference the number of fingers on one hand, but it also represents their three main senses (sight, hearing, smell). Two eyes, two ears, one nose. After the dictatorship, everyone pretty much just went back to the old base-10 and base-20 systems because screw it. Also base-5 just gives you trouble with large numbers.
Anyhow. High Vampiric went with base-10 because it was generally used by more covens, so it became the standard. Because High Vampiric is forced to never change, well, this system was chosen as the standard and it's the only one to be used for High Vampiric since. Vulgar Vampiric, on the other hand, is a mix of a bunch of different forms of Vampiric. Some people used base-20, some people used base-10, it was just a mess. The thing is, most of the other species use base-20. As a result, border covens (who do most of the vampires' trading and thus interact with other species the most) adopted base-20. That led to base-20 becoming the standard in Vulgar Vampiric. Base-10 is still grammatically correct and fine to use, but it makes you seem a bit snooty ('cuz you're using the Prestige Number System™). Now, things get a bit crazy. Or not, we'll see. Vulgar Vampiric pronounces and writes numbers in a way that's pretty similar to us. So they have an individual number word for 20 (well, '10' in base-20) and 40 ('20') and they combine number words for things like 69 (which becomes '30' '9'). You know how we have unique words for the tens? Like twenty, thirty, forty, etc.? Well, that's how Vulgar Vampiric works. There are also similarities between the word for 'finger' and the numbers 1-10 and the word for 'toe' and the numbers 11-20. This relationship might not be immediately obvious, but there are similarities in the root (because they started counting on their hands and then their toes, so... yeah). High Vampiric, on the other hand... not really. For one, their numbers do not have a recognizable relationship with either fingers or toes. They do have separate words for 0-9 and then 10, 100, 1,000, etc. In other words they have words for each digit and then multiples of 10. So instead of saying 20, they'd say 'two ten.' 39 would be 'three ten nine' and 1943 would be 'thousand nine hundred four ten three.' From my understanding, Mandarin works pretty similarly, but I honestly don't know. If anyone here knows how Mandarin numbers work, please let me know.
Okay, one last thing. This is where things can go from a bit crazy to very crazy. Numbers change depending on what we are counting. Think of it like the difference between "one" and "first." In Vampiric, we just have more differences. There are different numbers for vampires, animate non-vampires (so Mages, squirrels, etc.), small units of time (days, hours, minutes, seconds), and large periods of time (weeks, months, years, decades, centuries, etc.), and then a last set of numbers for everything else (concepts, inanimate things, etc.). There is also an ordinal number system, but this just involves attaching the same suffix to every number, so it's not too hard to deal with.
- Time: This is going to be a very complicated feature, since vampires are functionally immortal and all that. But... I'll try to fit everything under here.
To start, Vampiric can add tense markers to nouns and pronouns. These tense markers are identical to verbal markers. For example, English's "default" past tense marker is "-ed". If English worked like Vampiric, then you could say "I-ed" instead of "my past self." This way, vampires can reserve to themselves in the past as a somewhat different person (I mean, you do change as you grow older). However, this is not main way Vampiric uses tense markers with nouns. Instead, they are mostly used to derive new words. For example, the word for fiancé could be "spouse-[future marker]" and "fired person" could be "employee-[near past marker]".
Secondly (and this is more a cultural thing, but it manifests in the language), vampires have very complicated time metaphors. Vampires kind of have two natural stages in their life: change and stagnation. When they're young, they are noticeably changing. But once they reach a certain age, the aging process becomes almost imperceptible (emphasis on "almost"). As such, vampires have two ways of viewing time: you travel through time (aka aging) and time travels past you (aka when you've stopped aging but the world keeps going). This often manifests in Vampiric idioms. A youngster would say "I'm going towards the event," whereas an elder would say "the event is coming closer." (Just, you know, without it sounding so clunky.) Of course, time's interactions with non-vampires is very different. Time happens to them. Since basically everything else in the world ages at a noticeable pace (well, from vampires' POV), time happens to them. Time is still the one doing the traveling, but this also changes how one describes age. Young vampires have years (since they are traveling through time), so Alex would say "I am 20 years old," like we do in English. Older vampires have done their traveling and are now letting time come to them, so they say "I have 100 years" instead of "I am 100 years old." (It's also kinda a bragging thing about how old they are, since "having" is more of an accomplishment than "being," idk, vampires are all narcissists.) Since time happens to non-vampires, one would say "To Clarisse there are 23 years" instead of "Clarisse is 23 years old." Things get complicated with natural stuff, like mountains and whatever, since they also don't change very noticeably. Here... it's really up to the speaker. Different time metaphors can say different things about the nature of the event and the object. For example, if talking about how old a mountain is that is, well, ancient and hasn't changed in basically forever, a vampire could say that it "has" years. However, if it drastically changed (maybe it turned out to be a volcano that just hadn't erupted ever in known history and then, well, it erupted), then the mountain traveled through time, and time did not travel at all. Maybe if there is gradual change (like the mountain's getting eroded), then both time and the mountain are traveling. Maybe they're going at different rates. Again, stuff gets complicated.
Thirdly, time also has spatial metaphors. Again, this is a more cultural idea than linguistic thing, but it affects Vampiric metaphors and idioms. Time goes from bottom to top (so if vampires drew a timeline, it would be a vertical line, and the bottom-most event would be the oldest one and the top one could be recent history, the present, the future, you get the idea). This also affects idioms and is a persistent metaphor in Vampiric. Vampires often refer to the distant future as "far above," much like English speakers say that something is "far ahead." Likewise, vampires refer to what is in front of them as the past and what is behind them as the future. If a vampire is talking about the past, they'll gesture in front of them, and they will gesture behind them if talking about the future. For example, a Vampiric speaker would say that an event is "behind them" to indicate it is in the future, whereas an English speaker would see it as being in the past. This is because vampires see the past as something they can "see" (i.e. remember), so it makes sense that it is in front of them. Additionally, the present is basically the close space around them. Remember how the present tense represents what is happening around the current moment? Well, that's what this spatial-time thing does. A vampire could point to where they are to represent the current moment (like, idk, point at their feet or something), and then to the sky to indicate the distant future. Essentially, the past and present are both "stuff I can detect," whereas the future is "super far away stuff that I figure exists but idk really." This leads to a whole bunch of idioms and the like. For example, "the event smells strong" could mean that it will happen soon (remember, vampires' main sense is smell), and "I cannot smell [the event]" would mean that it will happen in the distant future. "It's at my feet" could mean that the event is in the recent past, whereas events happening around the head could be the near future. "It is in stone" means that it is an ancient event (as in it's deep underground), "it is in the dirt" means that it is a more recent event, and "it is in the clouds" means that it is in the future. Of course, stars kind of break this pattern, since vampires see the stars as the souls of dead vampires, but... I'm too tired to deal with that inconsistency. I guess it's just a weird quirk of vampire culture for now.
MISC NOTES: more complex vowels than consonants, agglutinative for the most part (fusional with conjugation, agglutinative with cases, negation, basically everything else), formality (vampire vs nonvampire), adjectives, aspect That's all for now! It is 3AM, so I am going to bed. I'll update this list later (in additional posts, probably, we'll see). Later editions will include pronouns (clusivity, number, person, droppable), some minor tone stuff (mostly used to express respect), conjugations (reflecting tense, aspect, mood, pronoun alignment) (basically how Spanish works) (and with an optional evidentiality marker), and miscellaneous stuff (closeness/relatedness prepositions, question formation, etc.). if you can't tell, i'm using this last bit to jot down ideas so i don't forget them, lol
EDIT #1: added the fluid-s section, difference between how High and Vulgar Vampiric treat /ə/ in vowel harmony
EDIT #2: changed conjugation so it includes tense, added a long pronoun description, and notes about the agglutinative language structure, included a tiny bit about noun-adjective order under the SVO comment
EDIT #3: changed pronoun section (removed specific vs general thing, added in a bit about pronoun dropping), added sense words and diminutives sections
EDIT #4: added in number system basics (and then added some more about what numbers are called), added in spaces so the mega-list is a bit more readable
EDIT #5: made high and vulgar vampiric lingua francas, added in a note that aspect goes crazy, not that much
EDIT #6: added vulgar vampiric's sound change mess section, complicated the present tense, added the monstrous time section (nouns and tense markers, time metaphors, time-and-space metaphors)
EDIT #7: added in the noun classes, started on the formality section
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