An Introduction to My Conlang: Marešidi
A conlang is a constructed language and, although I have long been fascinated by the likes of Tolkien’s Quenya or Martin’s Dothraki, I’ve only recently started to develop my own fictional one. I call it Marešidi and it is very much still in its infancy. As part of my efforts to keep myself disciplined in its creation, I have decided to start documenting it on B2T.
This means "The Marešidi Language"
I am primarily developing the language for the science fiction novel that I am writing, so it would make sense if I provide a little relevant background on the universe where it take place. The book is set on Mars towards the end of the current millennium. In the timeline, permanent settlements had been unsuccessfully attempted for a period of almost 900 years; when our main characters are living, humanity has finally achieved a solid grip on its red soil. There are around 3 million people living on the planet by the year 2991.
Marešidi as a language is developed by a group of linguists that are sponsored by the Martian government. This, among other things like the production of a Martian cuisine and a Martian musical identity, is done in a concerted effort to combat the dearth of Martian culture. It is loosely based around a system of jargon that had existed at an earlier point, but it is fleshed out into a full linguistic system by the aforementioned group of linguists around 60 years before the story I’m telling takes place.
It is similar to Esperanto or other constructed auxiliary languages in that it aims to be a lingua franca among international affairs on Mars, though this doesn’t really become reality until Mars devolves into totalitarianism. At the beginning of the story, it is a decorative language. It is taught in schools and seen on signs and official papers are translated into it, though this is more for the sake of the perceived identity it offers the Martians than it is for the actual ease of practice. In reality, few people use it in conversation, but this superficial use was kind of expected before it was created. Its main purpose in the story, besides the fun world-building element, is to act as a unifier among Martians, something to be seen by outsiders as a product of Martian culture. After all, when a group of people have their own language, it makes their case for self-governence a lot stronger.
The way that the language relates to the story itself is not what I am aiming to share on B2T. When I write about Marešidi here, I’ll be sharing updates about its construction and what I am noticing or excited about as I go through the process. Perhaps in the future I will share chunks of my story here and the different ways Marešidi pops up throughout it, but for now, the language will be developed on B2T divorced from its wider context. If you have interest in my story, feel free to email me about it!
The Sounds and Syllabary of Marešidi
Like any spoken language, Marešidi has a sound inventory, an outline of all the sounds that are found in a given language. They are as follows:
/i/ sounds like the ‘ee’ in feet
/p/ sounds like the ‘p’ in tap
/b/ sounds like the ‘b’ in cab
/β/ to make this sound, blow out like you’re extinguishing a candle and then add voice
/ʙ/ to make this sound, the lips are kept together and air is blown through them
/m/ sounds like the ‘m’ in map
/a/ sounds like the ‘a’ in about
/f/ sounds like the ‘f’ in farm
/v/ sounds like the ‘v’ in vial
/θ/ sounds like the ‘th’ in thought
/ð/ sounds like the ‘th’ in that
/e/ sounds like the ‘ay’ in bay
/t/ sounds like the ‘t’ in tax
/d/ sounds like the ‘d’ in deal
/s/ sounds like the ‘s’ in soul
/n/ sounds like the ‘n’ in now
/o/ sounds like the ‘o’ in row
/u/ sounds like the ‘oo’ in food
/tʃ/ sounds like the ‘ch’ in chair
/ʃ/ sounds like the ‘sh’ in shame
/ʒ/ sounds like the ‘s’ in pleasure or the ‘g’ in genre
/r/ sounds like the ‘r’ in road
/l/ sounds like the ‘l’ in lawn
Marešidi has its own writing system. It is a syllabary, in the same category as the systems of Amharic and Japanese hiragana. A syllabary is different from an alphabet in that single symbols represent syllables instead of individual sounds, namely consonant-vowel pairs. There are symbols for single consonants and single vowels, but whenever a consonant is followed by a vowel, you are expected to use the symbol that speaks to both of them.
Below you can find the various symbols for the sounds above. The column to the right in the second image (starting with ‘k’) contains the symbols for the numbers as well as the sounds that are not found in Marešidi but which have symbols since they are common in languages like English. They can often be found in loan words.
All of the symbols contain a vertical line which stretches upwards from the bottom. The reason the vowels have two forms is because they will usually combine with their preceding consonants. If a syllable starts with a vowel, the full symbol for the vowel on the left is present, but if it is part of a consonant-vowel pair, it is reduced to the form on the right. This reduced form is then joined to what is called the “leg” of the consonant (the vertical line to the left or at the center of the symbol). The words for “The Martian Language” written above utilizes at least one of each reduced symbol. They are the ones inhabiting the lower part of each glyph. When a consonant is not followed by a vowel, a dot appears.
If you know anything about phonetics, you would notice that none of these sounds are made with the back of the mouth. This was intentional. I wanted to make the language as visual as possible, perhaps to the point where people can understand each other without hearing. Sounds made with the lips and teeth and front of the tongue are easier to pick apart when you only have sight. After all, we call it lip-reading, not throat-reading. My train of thought was that it would be cool for astronauts to still be able to speak to each other through their closed-system space suits if for some reason their communications devices went offline. It would be like trying to communicate with someone underwater. Although I still stand by this idea being a cool one, this is more of a fossilized quirk of the language rather than an actual practical one.
The Structure of Marešidi (Nouns, Verbs, & Adjectives)
The words in Marešidi have fixed structures depending on the class they belong to. The structure of their syllables are as follows:
Nouns
Nouns are CVC. In other words, the syllables always start and end with a consonant. There are a couple exceptions where nouns start with nouns (such as the word ešem, the noun for “meaning”) but for the most part, you will only see nouns that start and end with consonants.
Nouns are commonly affixed by suffixes and prefixes. The noun for “air” (more specifically, life-sustaining vapor) becomes the word for “milk” when a liquid /lo-/ prefix is added. Additionally, nouns can be compounded with verbs, adjectives, or other nouns in that the first part of the compound describes the noun it combines with. For example, the word for “party” is boncin, a compound that joins the adjective bon (“fun”) and the noun cin (“meeting”). A double-noun compound example would be the word for “library” šabtoš, a combination of the words for “book” and “place.” The word for “city/settlement” is pisabir, a verb-noun compound which translates more accurately to “land for living on.”
Some random, commonly-used nouns:
ruž ‘thing/vessel’
thuth ‘heart’
rašiv ‘mouth’
ḅirduḅor ‘dinner’
fip ‘air’
lofip ‘milk’
pan ‘human/person’
reman ‘woman/feminine person’
faman ‘man/masculine person’
nebvif ‘love’
Verbs
Verbs are (C)VCV meaning that they will always end with a vowel-consonant-vowel pattern. Most verbs are at least four letters and start with a consonant, but a few very common ones (such as ema meaning “to be”) are only three letters. Similar to nouns, they can be created through compounding with a noun (the noun pir meaning “work” joins with the verb žaso, “to do,” in order to make the verb, piržaso, “to work”) adjective (sueridi meaning “empty” fuses to the verb ire “to cause” and creates the verb suerire “to empty”), or less commonly a verb (thisevidha meaning “to dream” directly translates as “to sleep-watch”).
Verbs are conjugated in Marešidi, so the form that you see above probably won’t be the one you see in an actual sentence. For example, the first-person conjugation suffix is /-mu/ so when using the verb žofa (“to breathe”) to refer to yourself breathing, it would become žofamu (“I breathe”).
The verb will have its own post in the future because it is the most complicated class. This is because the verb root can have a lot of affixes which change its meaning. A verbal affix can indicate a mood, a modal, an auxiliary, an interrogative, a negation, an aspect, tense, a direct object, or an indirect object. And it can even do many at once! This creates situations where we can have a single word which holds a lot of information.
Take the word: ecefounebvifubumuidhefi. When broken into its parts, we get the following:
ece - a modal that indicates potential, “could”
fou - an auxiliary that indicates the perfect tense, “have”
nebvifu - a regular verb meaning “love”
bu - indicates negation, “not”
mu - conjugation indicating the first-person, singular tense, “I”
idhe - conjugation indicating the simple past tense, “-ed”
fi - a second-person singular direct object, “you”
If you play around with the order of the words in the parentheses, you get a full sentence in English, “I could not have loved you.” Luckily, it turns out that, both in English and Marešidi, sentences that require seven ideas to be attached to a single verb are somewhat rare. I can’t really think of a non-specific context where ecefounebvifubumuidhefi would arise.
Some random, common verbs in Marešidi:
thadhu ‘to know’
žaso ‘to do’
vidha ‘to look at/to watch’
tura ‘to move’
turi ‘to go’
pami ‘to talk/to speak’
vampami ‘to call’
saffaru ‘to hear’
pisa ‘to live (in a location)’
šema ‘to happen/to occur’
Adjectives
Adjectives are probably the simplest word class. They always have the same ending and they can be easily formed from nouns and verbs. The adjectival suffix is /-idi/. In fact, you’re already familiar with an adjective, the name of the language itself. Marešidi is the adjective meaning, “Martian” or “of/relating to Mars.”
To make an adjective from a verb (verbal adjectives are also known as participles), the final vowel is deleted and /-idi/ is added. The verb šime meaning “to die” becomes šimidi when it has the meaning of “dead.”
To make an adjective from a noun, nothing is deleted and /-idi/ is added. “Narrow” is a base adjective in English, but in Marešidi it is formed from the noun šes (“narrowness”) joined by /-idi/ becoming šesidi.
Some typical adjectives:
oidi ‘good’
eridi ‘bad’
mufidi ‘new’
felovidi ‘chaotic’
pifidi ‘full’
bonidi ‘fun’
ḅuḅidi ‘intentional’
žuridi ‘red’
Marešidi ‘Martian’
I’ve decided to go through adverbs, prepositions, and other word classes (articles, complementizers, modals, etc.) in a later post.
Like English, Marešidi is a Subject-Verb-Object language, meaning that the doer comes first, the action comes second, and the thing being acted upon comes last. For example, the sentence, “We like your parents,” is Cinu othadhu ḅamutaḅonu, where cinu is the subject, othadhu is the verb, and ḅamutaḅonu is the object. Written in Marešidi’s script, it looks like this:
When in a sentence, words are underlined to join their parts. The end of a sentence is indicated by a filled-in diamond. A hollow diamond indicates a comma or pause. A double filled-in diamond indicates the end of a contained statement, paragraph, or document.
And this concludes our first lesson in Marešidi! Now, you’ll be able to start recognizing the symbols and you can even train yourself to begin reading them.
Until next time!
Dillon
