@outofgloom
Apologies for tagging you like this, but I wanted to ask a hypothetical that wouldn’t fit in the ask box. Say I’m creating a setting (Or really, a variation of an existing setting) in which there are multiple Matoran villages of the same element. I was thinking that instead of naming one Ta-Koro and then coming up with some random word for the others, it would make more sense to delineate them by their location. So you have “Ta-Koro in the volcano”, “Ta-Koro in the valley,” and “Ta-Koro by the lava river” for example.
Pursuing your dictionary, I wasn’t able to consistently find good words to uniquely describe some of the specific sorts of environments I was looking for. Some can be covered by using the name of the area, (”Ta-Koro in the volcano” becoming “Ta-Koro in the Mangaia” for example) but that unfortunately isn’t something that can be done with all of them. What do you think the Matoran etymology for ideas like valley, cliff, swamp, glacier, etc. would look like?
In addition, I wanted to ask about how I would translate the “in the” part of these names. The best one I could find was “kiro,” the word for something being within a boundary, but I figured I should ask you if that’s a valid usage, or if there’s a better option. (Ta-Koro Kiro Mangaia is a bit of a mouthful if nothing else.)
First off, it sounds like you are referencing the 2nd Edition of the Matoran Dictionary, which is pretty limited and idiosyncratic when it comes to vocab. I’d suggest you shift over to more recent materials linked in this post on the Matoric Language, if you haven’t seen them yet. Specifically, the Phrasebook of Matoric has a lot of useful vocab to peruse.
As for your questions: In order to specify a particular variant of “Ta-Koro”, it can be as simple as adding an additional modifier onto the end of the phrase, so Ta-Koro X. The Phrasebook has a list of geographical terms that could be used, imaged below:
It’s not comprehensive, but I suspect you’ll be able to pull some candidates from here. For example:
Ta-Koro Boru = “Forest Ta-Koro” or “Ta-Koro at/near/related to (a) forest
Ta-Koro Nuuru = “Mountain Ta-Koro” or “Ta-Koro at/near/related to (a) mountain”
Ta-Koro Padaru = “Coast Ta-Koro” or “Ta-Koro at/near/related to (a) shoreline”
The same principle applies if you want to use a placename like Mangai: Ta-Koro Mangai “Mangai Ta-Koro”. I’ll add in a few additional words that might help:
rana “lava, magma” rangovo “lava river” rangala “lava lake” tanuru or nuruta “volcano” (also ranuru or nurana) koka, kokka, kopa, or konu’o “glacier, large mass of ice” garu or gahru “wetland, swamp, bog”
If you do specifically want to refer to the spatial position of the village, like “in” or “near” or “beside”, you can complicate things a bit by using some of the spatial markers in Matoric, which would attach to the modifier word at the end of the phrase (these are covered briefly at the end of the Phrasebook and in full in Chapter 4 of the Introduction to Matoric).
pa_o “at (a position), near” on_u “in, inside of” ke_u “outside of” ka_a “to, toward” os_u “away from, far from” ve_u “extending from” _ianga “beside, next to”
So for example, Ta-Koro pa Boru o translates to “Ta-Koro at/near (a) forest”, while Ta-Koro on Boru u translates to “Ta-Koro inside of (a) forest”, while Ta-Koro ve Boru u would translate to “Ta-Koro extending from (a) forest”. All of those might be different villages, depending on how many new villages you are postulating.
