Chatcaavan Language

Chatcaavan language. You can view the existing vocabulary for the Chatcaavan language here.

Phonemes

• Accepted Consonants: b, ch, d, f, g, h, l, m. n, p. q, r, ts, s, t, v, w, z, k, with 'sh' an archaic version of 'ch'.
• Accepted Vowels: ah, au, ay, eh, ih, oh, ooh, uh.

Overview

The Chatcaavan tongue likes its consonants, dislikes agglutination, prefers its verbs separate from its nouns, and is littered with many other features that contribute to it sounding “choppier” than Eldritch does to the untrained ear. Where you see multiple vowels in Chatcaavan words (like the word ‘Chatcaava’ itself), they are intended to convey syllable stress, not phonetic differences: thus, chat CAA vah. (And the ‘ch’ is actually pronounced ‘sh’... sorry about that.)

Lisinthir’s description of the reification of concepts in Chatcaavan is accurate. It’s also one of the most crucial distinctions its previous ambassadors failed to grasp, through no fault of the Seersa who were sent to document the language; their critical failure was not in noticing the linguistic differences, but in failing to map them accurately to the culture, which they were poorly prepared to grasp. This is one of the few times we see anything grafted onto nouns in Chatcaavan (that I know of). The difference between ‘treasure’ (the concrete thing a dragon hoards) and ‘Treasure’ (the abstract ideal, the platonic perfect ideal) is that the abstraction takes tense on the noun rather than the verb.

So, for the ideal:

• Past-Beauty moves me > "Beauty moved me."
• Future-Hope strengthens my fleet. > "Hope will strengthen my fleet."

Versus normal concrete nouns, taking the tense where English-speakers would put it, on the verb:

• The wind buffeted me.
• I will do that thing.

Or, to use the examples for the ideals:

• Beauty moved me > A Chatcaavan named Beauty dragged me somewhere.
• Hope will strengthen me > A weapon, or a ship, or a person named Hope will strengthen my fleet.

The idea there is that concepts exist throughout time, and all acts revolve around their permanence; while normal people and things do their time on stage and are gone. They don't get to exist forever. Titles, like abstractions, take tense on the noun. This is one of the reasons Chatcaava want them so badly; they imply immortality, significance. So here you can see the differences between a Chatcaavan named Knife and “the Knife”:

• Knife pushed me. > A Chatcaavan named Knife shoved me around.
• Past-Knife pushed me. > The Knife (the Chatcaavan wearing the title The Knife) pushed me around.

The ideal or abstraction has religious overtones, as some stories tell that it originates with the Living Air before time began, and is the most perfect version of the concept. "For us, an abstraction is not the same as an object. In your language, you use the same referents for it. In ours, they are different. Nothing is lower than an object. Nothing is higher than an abstraction."

History, Etymology, Regionality, Etc

There are at least seven dialects of this language.

Some words appear to be used exclusively by males, and are unknown to females.

Grammar

Word Order: SOV

Adjectives/adverbs go in front of their modified words. If you're chaining adjectives/adverbs they all need to have (i)k added to them. So if you want to call something 'large' and 'great' it's tedik vararik (noun), not ted varar noun. One of the exceptions to this rule is place names, where the noun leads: so 'city large', rather than 'large city.'

Pronouns

• I - eh
• he/she/it/them - ayf
• in-my-face - ko

"my-lesser" and "my-better" are grafts: ko before the pronoun for 'my-better' (yes, 'in your face' is considered a sign of dominance) and pu after for 'my lesser'. So:

   I-your-better: ko-eh
   I-your-lesser: eh-pu
   You-my-better: ko-ko
   You-my-lesser: actually uses a different word for 'you' and I don't know what it is yet.
   They-my-betters: ko-ayf
   They-my-lessers: ayf-pu

It appears to be 'I/me' 'things/people not me' and 'things/people in my face'. Lisinthir (dryly): "We call the latter 'you'." 'me' 'others I can ignore' 'others that are facing off against me' There's no he/she/it either. You can say 'male others I ignore' or 'female others I ignore' or 'not-living things I ignore' but you have to throw the word in front of it. I dunno, there's a glorious... fluidity to it? If you're not living in the context you're going to miss most of what they're saying. >.<

Possessive pronouns were built off the sentence "I take (and the taking is completed)": e (I) met (take) ok (done) -- emetok (my/mine) Also all right: emetat -- (in the process of being made mine, mine right now) emetesh -- (will be mine, I am planning to make it mine) emetim -- forever mine

Theirs/not mine: aymetok / aymetat / aymetesh / aymetim (you/yours): kometok / kometat / kometesh / kometim

Plural

There is no plural noun ending. You say 'many animal' or 'two animal' or 'a quintillion animal' or 'only one animal'. There's a single shorthand, though, which is to use 't' in front of something: t'animal. Because 'to' (blurry/indistinct) was a common way to describe lots of things when seen overhead by someone flying. 'it was a big blur'.

Verb Tenses

• DONE: kot
• STILL DOING: ta
• PLANNED: shet
• FOREVER EXISTING: im (gnomic/eternal)

There are... four tenses. That's it. Honestly they're more like conditionals. You want to enforce conditionals or even specificity, you use extra nouns/verbs. 'I walk to the store two days ago.' The tenses are 'done/still doing/planned.' But nothing about time.

Madamebadger on Discord: I keep trying to narrate everyday actions to myself in Chatcaavan and brain breaking. Like "I made latkes for dinner" becomes "I make(done) latkes yesterday for dinner" "I am watching Law & Order" = "I watch(ongoing) Law & Order right now" "I am going to the store" = "I go(planned) to the store in the future" And I have to assume "I was going to go to the store" = "I go(planned) to the store in the past but it didn't happen" Or, depending on meaning, "I go(planned) to the store in the future so don't stop me" And "I am going to the store" could be "I go(planned) to the store in the future" if I mean "I am going to the store today," but "I go(planned) to the store right now" if I'm asked "Where are you going?" And "I am watching Law & Order" could be also "I watch(planned) Law & Order later today" if it's the answer to the question "WHat are you doing this evening" And I guess "Where are you going?"--leaving aside the entirely separate question of how they form questions--could be parsed as "Where do you go(planned)?" or "Where do you go(ongoing)?" depending on whether you're asking "where are you going this afternoon?" or "I have caught you mid-trek and want to know the destination." So they flatten out time distinctions and require extra words for those, but disambiguate some concepts that we flatten out.

Accent

Chatcaavan names:

If they start with a consonant, accent is on the second syllable: KauVAUC SehkVIHT KuuVEL

This also applies to many words. (ChatCAAva)

If they start with a vowel, accent is on the first syllable: OOOvehk.

Writing

Directionality

sample texts

Chatcaavan, scratched originally on stone on tablets and monuments, was written up to down, from right to left.

Once they invented paper and started binding books, and you need scribes to create each page, writing was written "toward the sky" (in other words, the outside margin). You would start at the bottom right of the left page and work out toward the margin. Once you got to the end of the page (at the top!) you would return to the bottom left of the opposite page and again, start toward the margin.

Separate sheets were written "sunwise", a term that came about because scribes were historically seated in the same orientation, with the sun to the left of them, to help with visibility. When the printing press came around, religious documents, and governmental ones, continued to be written sunwise, but everything else started copying the tablet mode (including books, which means older books can be dated based on the directionality of their writing.)

Modern Chatcaavan is almost always written in the tablet mode thanks to computer displays, and flow from bottom to top.

Alphabet

• 

  Consonants
• 

  Vowels

Numbers

Numbers use scratches through them to indicate estimations, and the more scratches, the poorer the estimate. Three are the most a number can carry and indicate very poor confidence.

First five numbers:

• 1 - cho (also 'set', or 'closed')
• 2 - go
• 3 - kep
• 4 - dot
• 5 - ma