How I made the Aramteskan language for P.M. Freestone’s Shadowscent
When P.M. Freestone first told me about Shadowscent, her YA Fantasy duology set in a scent-filled world, I was immediately intrigued. After reading an early draft of the opening chapter I was hooked. I have greatly enjoyed having the opportunity to create the Aramteskan language for this series.
You get some glimpses of Aramteskan in book one The Darkest Bloom (or Shadowscent as it’s known in the USA), but there’s a lot more of the language that doesn’t make it onto the page. Over the next year or so between books one and two being published I'll be writing occasional posts about how the language works.
I want to start by outlining the three main things that influenced my decision-making process; the world of Aramtesh, the medium of books and how language works.
Thinking about the world Freestone built
In Aramtesh scent is prized, commodified and used to create social meaning in a way that is more like visual status symbols in our culture. I therefore made it central to many choices I made about how the grammar of the language works. There are many more verbs for smelling than, say, movement. There are also subtle translation choices; people in Aramtesh don’t talk about ‘facing forward’, they talk about being ‘nose forward’. The language also has an evidential system that marks if you know about something because you smelled it.
Of course, there are non-scent features of the world that influence the language too. Aramtesh is an empire with diverse geography, and a range of cultures. Freestone and I spent a lot of time talking through these different regions and their history. Although there is one language spoken across the Empire, it has its own characteristics in each area; People from Hagmir pronounce vowels more like Old Aramteskan, you’ll only find names with ‘ph’ in Aphorai and names that begin with ‘I’ are distinctly from Trel (Hi there Iddo!).
There’s also at least half a millennium of time history between the earliest documents of the empire and when the story takes place. I built a few centuries of language change into Aramteskan to give that sense of history; think something between Chaucer’s Middle English and Shakespear’s early Modern English.
Thinking about books and reading
The language not only had to suit the world, but also work in YA fantasy with a cracking pace. All of the sounds of the language can be written using standard keyboard, and mostly have the pronunciation you would expect as an English speaker. We didn’t want the language to feel too jarring to readers.
Did I also take into account how the language would sound if someone turned Shadowscent into a film or TV show? Of course!
I’m very excited that translation rights have been sold for a number of language. I’m looking forward to seeing how the names and words we created are translated into French, Hungarian and Czech, and very excited to see how they’ll look transliterated into Cyrillic for the Russian version.
Thinking about how human language works
Because constructed languages are made through a series of conscious choices, it provides an opportunity to make decisions to include features that don’t appear in ‘natural languages’ (the term conlangers use for language that emerge through use and transmission, like English, ASL, Hindi and the 7000 or so others). I wanted Aramteskan to be mostly naturalistic, doing things that we usually find in human languages, with a few twists.
This is where my knowledge of linguistics became very useful. I know that most of the structures I’ve created are not very unusual, but some of them are so unusual we don’t have any documented evidence of them in natural languages. Take the ‘smell evidential’ I mentioned above. We know that around a quarter of the world’s languages have evidentials, which let you mark the source of your evidence. Many languages have one that marks that you saw something, or sensed it, or that someone told you about it. No natural human language to date has one that means specifically you know something because you smelt it. Adding that was a fun way to break with naturalness, while also fitting in with the world of Aramtesh.
Shadowscent book 1 available now!
Shadowscent: The Darkest Bloom is out in the UK, and is now in the US with a different cover (and a map!!!), and is just called Shadowscent. For more details, and information about where you can buy a copy, visit P.M. Freestone’s website.
The Art of Language Invention - David J. Peterson (my review of this handy book)
Lingthusiasm Episode 37: Smell words, both real and invented
The Darkest Bloom: Shadowscent Book 1 is out in the UK!
