Kirlin - The Melodical Tongue
Hello all! I have computer science exams in a week and as a procrastination project I have decided to make a constructed language - not the first I ever made but the first and probably only one I will ever share with the internet save the release of my books which are not soon to come.
Chrona sa chronver, nenanam ad nanamat sa.
Chis hita okias, ki terri vera chronver, nanam ash ë?
Kiri nananur, tsua ë Iiwatamat sa?
Kiri fia, kiri Teada main sa, mia hoshya que.
Translation: Before the shaping of time, when of nothing was made into everything. Before the little children awoke and the trees grew green, what was (there)? Of what beauty, and when, was it made into me? I feel the beauty, I think of the beautiful Earth, Because I want to see the world.
The idea to create this language was based off the "cute" sounding aesthetic of Japanese and the suffici of the European Tongues allowing for poetry based off rhyme: Such a thing is sadly not possible in Japanese, except syllable-based poetry like Haikus, as in Japanese all sentences end with a verb which within one language style of Japanese (casual or formal) forces you to rhyme 'desu' with 'desu', 'masu' with 'masu' or if you do switch to the less formal tongue, all verbs still end with one of the u-Hiragana. This is where I merge Japanese vocabulary with the European "poetic" grammar, a grammar with complex endings allowing for multi-layered rhyme poetry. As a challenge for the Japanese learners: Try to find words derived from Japanese.
The grammar of Kirlin is per se, nothing special, not even in the slightest. It used Latin-like declination tables for da-, a-, e-, i-, n- and r- nouns, with a combination of Japanese-style particle grammar for locative, temporal, causal, modal and other cases. The declination rows for a noun consists of subject, dative and accusative/ object case, but if you use a noun with a particle as an object, you'd refer to the subject case. Genitive is done by stacking words, this is the German feature I love most: I'm looking at you Rindfleischettikierungsaufgabenüberwachungs-something-something-gesetz.
The 'magic' comes from the choice of words and avoidance
Iiwata mia: [Teada] ki terrem ä, rota mo roosàm.
To the Japanese learners: The Japanese words derived from are 'ichi', 'watashi', 'miru', 'ki' and 'mo'. The word terri, meaning green, I derived from Teada, meaning earth. To those who already see what this sentence means, it's the popular verse from 'Wonderful World'. Let's break it down. wata is derived from 'watashi', which in Japanese means 'I', in Kirlin however alone it refers to the exclusive 'us'. 'Ii' is the number one, and 'ni' is the number two. The numbers are used as a prefix to derived new words: 'one of us', meaning 'I', 'myself', and 'two of us', indicating the 'inclusive we'. mia means 'to see'; the infinitive form matches with the first person, simple present (for continous form you typically use sa, meaning 'to do' and derived from Japanese suru). Teada is an insert, meaning Earth, so the sentence gets enough syllables for a Haiku verse in Kirlin. The sentence translates to "I see trees [of the Earth] are green, red roses too." mo acts exactly as in Japanese: It's the 'also' or 'too'-particle
Aba ne iilima mono, ea miseas sà ver.
This is a response to a discord challenge from user nixl0 on discord who gave this challenge-sentence: "but it's not the only thing, as you're making it seem", at first I was astonished at the level of grammar this seemingly simple sentence had. When I wrote this down in Kirlin I was crazy (in a good sense) about this language, I absolutely loved the seemingly swinging tunes this sentence has (try to make a slight pause after ne, mono, miseas and ver). Aba, derived from German 'Aber' equals to 'but', ne is the negation of iilima mono, lima means on its' own 'limit' or 'destination' but in combination with a number it refers to "limited to one" = "only", mono is used exactly as in Japanese, misea is 'to seem', and ea miseas sa is "you're making [it (implied)] seem" and ver is "like" or "as". Literally translated it's "But it's not limited to one thing, like you're making it seem"
To the Japanese challenge: The words are 'mono', 'miseru' and 'suru'
Atta ni atsua ë? Ne, ooki atadaue monaise possa que Iiwatam nei.
This is the response to a discord challenge from user jjommoma on discord who gave this challenge: "Is it hot out? Nope. For me it’s not. I’ve got a big block of ice on my head. Heatwave! Mmmm! Heatwave!" Before we begin - yes - I don't have a word for 'Heatwave' and I think the weakness of a two-week old language. This one is too long to analyze, so I'll only respond to the Japanese challenge here: 'ni', 'atsui', 'ookii', 'atama' and the words that make up 'Iiwata'. 'atama' was transformed into 'ata-da', a da-noun. I'm not going to talk much about da-nouns because they are a mistake. I'm not removing them, but they're still terrible, being the first type of words, they have a bunch of exceptions and don't follow logic of other nouns. 'lin-da' meaning music, is also such a noun and see where in Kirlin the suffix went: Nowhere.
[Guide on Pronounciation]
The letters are pronounced with few exceptions like in German, meaning 'Atta' would be pronounced in English more like 'Uhtah' and 'chronver' would be pronounced 'kron-were', the exceptions are that 'h' directly following 'd' is silent and 'dz' is pronounced like the first letter in 'jam'. The two dots do not indicate any pronunciation differences, unlike German Umlaute, but instead mark modal verbs like 'to be' and 'to go' or 'to say'
[Deriving the name Kirlin]
I previously mentioned the problem with da-nouns, which reflects well in the language name: da-noun don't have the 'suffix da', instead they have the noun indicator, a legacy concept I quickly abandoned after the language had a bare skeleton. I keep it because all languages have some exceptions after all. Genitive is done with regular nouns by putting the dependent word before the other by removing the suffix and keeping the word stem. The exception with da-nouns is that if you put adjectives before the noun it is in singular, otherwise in plural, but you have to add the ending. Kiri means beautiful and linda means song. While Lindakiri refers to "songs beautiful", many songs that are beauty itself, Kirlin means "The beautiful Song"
[Subset of Vocabulary]
- ä (modal, a-verb) means 'to be', to 'exist', can also make the noun into a verb like is the case with ai.
- ad: Temporal particle, specifies time of action
- aise (e-noun) means 'ice'; with mono 'thing of ice' = ice cube
- chrona (a-noun) means 'flow of time', 'time cycle'; with ii 'one time'; with ver without suffix: before
- doki (i-noun) means 'someone' (plural); with ii singular; with ne negative (nobody) and with the question particle ë, 'who'. (from Japanese doko)
- linda (da-noun) means 'song'
- kiri (i-adjective) means 'beautiful' (from Japanese kirei)
- mono (o-noun) means 'thing'
- nana (a-noun) something (plural); with ii singular 'something specific'; with ne negative (nothing) and with the question particle ë, 'what'. (from Japanese nani)
- ni: Location particle, specifying target
- sa (modal, a-verb) means 'to do', with other verbs it makes continuous form (from Japanese suru)
- Wata (a-noun) means 'us' (exclusive); with ii: myself, one of us; with ni: we (inclusive), two of us; with ne: none of us.