Sometimes I randomly remember that Kaz is the only member of the Crows who only speaks one language and for no apparent reason I find that endlessly amusing.
Like, the comedic potential here? Nina and Inej girl talking but as soon as he walks in the room they switch to Ravkan?? Wylan and Nina chatting in Kerch but then switching to Fjerdan when Matthias walks in and suddenly Kaz has completely lost track of the conversation?? Jesper saying something to Kaz in Zemeni that makes Nina howl with laughter, but neither of them will tell him what it was??? It’s so funny to me.
He would also absolutely start learning another language out of sheer spite if they did this, but I think it would be hilarious if he chose Kaelish and tried to use it with Jesper and Jesper would just be like “… I don’t speak Kaelish. I just know a little bit… I can sing in Kaelish, if you want?” and Kaz is so disappointed by this but he can’t show it so he just starts yelling at Nina in Kaelish instead. She corrects his pronunciation and he nearly murders her.
Had a lot of fun with this one actually, I just kept forgetting to work on it lol. Still have a bit more to flesh out but this is the main gist of how to use it
I’m learning Sindarin elvish from the LotR universe and I LOVE sharing its linguistic characteristics with my favourite LINGUISTICS NERD (platonic) wife @inseparablefromtheimpossible
The Bride of Shadows rework is coming to Itch in two weeks. I'll be doing a comprehensive post about it on launch day. In the meantime, I figured I'd share a bit of Wyransith with you. Wyransith is the fantasy language that the love interest Valdricht speaks in my interactive novel. In the new Dark Maiden story route, both of the love interests speak only Wyransith, placing a language barrier between them and your MC, even as sensual tension rapidly builds between them in the close quarters. While she struggles to understand them, they're more interested in keeping the MC in a state of undress than teaching her their language. I'm sure she'll learn. Eventually. In the meantime, here's a little lesson!
Wyransith (usually) follows a Subject - Object -Verb structure. Knowing that, let's examine the sentence: "Talven thy venirith myndir'vir, eri yn skeleth'vek."
Clause 1: talven thy venirith myndir'vir
talven - if (conditional marker)
thy - you (subject)
venirith - that (object)
myndir - to go/to start/to begin (verb)
-vir - imperative marker
Clause 2: eri yn skeleth'vek
eri - I (subject)
yn - him/it (object)
skeleth - to finish (verb)
-vek - future tense suffix
"If you start that, I will finish it."
A gentle, but firm warning to the MC, who is (unknowingly) doing something provocative whilst feeding in Valdricht's lap.
I know what you're wondering. Why is myndir in the imperative form and not conjugated in its simple present form "myndin?"
The conditional clause signifies a hypothetical action that Valdricht is directly addressing. He isn't issuing a passive statement, but rather a warning regarding the action "to start."
Try thinking of it like this:
"If you do that thing..." = direct addressing of a potential action
"If that thing happens..." = passive description of an event
The imperative myndir'vir captures the direct, personal nature of the warning. Valdricht isn't saying "if that thing gets started" - he's saying "if you start grinding against me that," placing the agency and choice squarely on the MC.
Note, I didn't say he's warning against the MC doing that. In fact, he'd much prefer that she continue.
From the Daevapedia Wiki: The language of the Daeva tribe. Described by Nahri as sounding similar to Hebrew, though Yaqub adamantly disagreed (City of Brass, Ch.1, p.17). When discussing with fans about writing some Divasti dialogue, the author wrote, "there was an embarrassing amount of time spent with proto-indo-european roots" (Chakraborty, Twitter, 4/13/2020) (1).
First of all, what is Proto-Into-European? It’s the “reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family”, which contains about 446 living languages spoken by over 3.4 billion people (2). That’s quite a lot, but we can narrow it down geographically.
This is a map of West Asia slapped on top of the Daevabad map from City of Brass. I made this overlay a while ago (in Google Slides, please excuse the quality), and while it’s not a perfect match, it gives us a better idea of which countries (and languages) make up Daevastana. In case the map text is too blurry, this region includes Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyztan, and Pakistan.
This region overlaps with the Iranian (or Iranic) branch of the Indo-European Language Family, shown by this map (3):
So here's my question: The Daeva tribe adopted the original name of their species as their tribal name. Did they do the same for their language? IE, is Divasti the original language spoken by the Daevas pre-Suleiman’s curse? In that case I want to look for the oldest language spoken in the “Daevastana” region.
The Iranian language family is chronologically classified into Old, Middle, and New Iranian, with evidence of only TWO Old Iranian languages surviving. These are Avestan, and Old Persian (4). Avestan was originally spoken from around 1500 - 400 BCE (8), and Old Persian was adapted to cuneiform around 600 - 500 BCE (6).
Fun fact, Old Persian would have been the language used around the time of Darius the Great, whose name is a derivation of... Darayavahoush (9).
Avestan was already a dead language known only to priests by the 5th century AD, so I doubt any modern production would be able to adapt it for use as Divasti (5). That leaves Old Persian, which is a DIRECT ancestor of New Persian, aka, Farsi (6). Farsi is the most commonly spoken language of the Iranian language group (4). It has been spoken in its current stage since around the 8th century, and has around 127 million speakers today, predominantly in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan; all of which are located in "Daevastana" (7).
Here's a map of Farsi-speaking areas overlaid with the Daevabad map from City of Brass (10).
TL;DR: Divasti - Farsi/Persian
Bonus info and works cited under the split :)
Divasti is the only language of Daevabad for which we have actual dialogue samples!
City of Brass, Ch.9, p340:
"[Dara] glanced back at Ali. 'Naeda pouru mejnoas'".
"[Dara] jerked a thumb in Ali's direction, looking amused. 'Spa snasatiy nu hyat vaken gezr?'".
I didn't include these examples in consideration because I'm not a linguist and I have no idea how to reverse engineer them into whatever languages they came from. Also, the "sp" and "sn" sounds don't exist in Farsi (I know this because they don't exist in Urdu either). So those definitely came from another language...
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Works Cited:
1 - Daevapedia Fandom Wiki: Daevabad
2 - Wikipedia: Indo-European Languages
3 - Wikipedia - Map - Distribution of Iranian (Iranic) Languages
